U.S. Mass Shooting Survivors Speak On LI: 'It's Going To Happen Again'

NORTH FORK, NY — Kim Woodruff of Littleton, CO, was 17 years old and a high school junior when she sat down for lunch on April 20, 1999 with her best friend Anne Marie Hochhalter. It was warm, and the sun was hot on Anne Marie's back, so she asked Kim to switch seats. Soon after, the peace of that bright, sunny day was shattered as bullets rained on the scene.

Woodrufff's friend Anne Marie, her classmate at Columbine High School, was shot in the back.

Two teen gunmen, after a failed bombing attempt, killed 12 students and a teacher and injured 24 before committing suicide.‎

On July 20, 2012, Farrah Soudani was with her friends from Red Robin, going to see a late-night showing of "The Dark Knight Rises" at a Century 16 movie theater in Aurora, Colorado. After a few trips to the concession stand, the movie had just begun when mayhem ensued and a shooter killed 12 people and injured 70 others, including Soudani.

Mike Hawkins was a police officer at the scene.

Lt. Brian Murphy was shot 15 times on August 5, 2012, at the Sikh Temple of Wisconsin when a shooter opened fire, killing 7.

And for Bernie Meehan, a longtime fire chief and paramedic who was one of the first on the scene at the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting that left 20 small children and six teachers dead, what he saw and experienced that day is still not something he talks about, not often and not much.

But he will never forget.

Living witnesses to some of the nation's most horrific mass shootings, the five came together Friday night at Mattituck High School for a "Night of Survivors" panel, organized by Firehouse Training+, HUGS, Inc., and the Southold Town Fire Chief's Council. The event was meant to help train and educate first responders and other with an eye toward preparedness.

An active shooter drill followed, held Saturday at Mattituck High School. The purpose of the training exercise was to test communication methods and response with emergency responders, while immersed in an atmosphere simulating a real emergency, the Mattituck-Cutchogue shcool district said.

Moderated by Kevin Riley, the event, said Chip Bancroft, whose company Firehouse Training Plus + organized the gathering, gave faces and voices to those left to grapple with the days and years after a mass shooting. "What we're focusing on tonight is the aftermath, the recovery piece — the piece that takes a lifetime," he said.

Riley began by asking the survivors to "reach back" and describe the events of those days.

Kim Woodruff, Columbine High School shooting

Woodruff said at about the same time her friend Anne Marie asked to switch seats, "I saw two boys carry a very large duffel bag up the hill. The boys at the top of the hill took out two guns, nodded to each other, and began shooting all my classmates," she said. "Several people were shot that day, including my best friend. She was shot twice in the back and she was paralyzed from the waist down."

Her best friend's mother took her own life six months later.

Describing that day, Woodruff said her identical twin sister, "a library kid," made it out alive.

"The power of kindness is huge," Woodruff said. "I want to reiterate that. I was always nice to those boys. I’m an identical twin so it’s very hard to tell us apart. In the library they looked under her table. And they had a discussion and left her table alone and went to the next because they couldn’t tell which one of us was which."

After Anne Marie was shot, Woodruff said, "I ran inside the building . The first person I ran into was Dave Sanders, who was one of our teachers. And I told him, 'Anne Marie’s been shot! Anne Marie’s been shot! I need help! Someone help me.' And he told everybody to get down. Then I went back outside and saw Lance get his jaw blown off."

Student Lance Kirklin, who survived, was shot point blank in the face.

"I went back to the building," Woodruff said. "There was a swarm of kids running over the tables to get away because the gunman was heading toward the cafeteria door," she said.

Some ran upstairs to the science classrooms, she said, some ran in other directions. "They all ended up getting out, for the most part, except for Dave Sanders, who was shot. He was the last one up the stairs, to make sure all the kids got out. Dave Sanders ended up dying in a classroom because first responders weren’t allowed in at that time."

Woodruff ran outside again, and began screaming profanities at the gunmen, she said. "They turned and started shooting toward me. I didn't know until later that there was a bomb under the car that I was hiding behind," she said.

She ran to find her twin in the library. "The kids were helping each other, holding each other, limping," she said. "The EMTs and first responders weren't allowed in, so the kids did triage themselves. The girls took off their shoes and made tourniquets out of their socks. The boys took off their shirts to hold bloody wounds. At that time, we didn't have the training. People didn't know what to do, how to respond," she said. "Unfortunately, the Columbine shooting was the training ground."

That's why training in advance, she believes, is critical. "If we can get the people to help fast enough, we can save lives. And that is huge, being able to help people as much as humanly possible."

Riley reminded that Columbine was meant to be a bombing. "Thank God they weren't good bomb makers," he said. "If so, they would have met their goal of killing 500 to 1,000 classmates. When the bombs didn't go off they reverted to Plan B, shooting."

Sanders, the teacher who ran to help evacuate students, was "a hero," Riley said.

In addition, Riley said, Columbine was "a watershed moment for law enforcement." There was a shift away, he said, from the paradigm, where EMTs and police, unlike according to past protocols, can now "go into the sound of gunfire. We can't wait any longer." It took Dave Sanders several hours to bleed out; had care been immediately available, he may have been saved, he said.

"Upwards of 25 percent of victims are saveable but bleed out," Riley said. "We simply cannot let people bleed out if they're saveable."

Farrah Soudani, Aurora, CO movie theater shooting

On July 20, 2012, Farrah Soudani, then 22, went to the Century 16 theater in Aurora, CO with a group of her friends from Red Robin to celebrate a friend's birthday.

They arrived at the theater at about 10:30 p.m., she said. A friend, a "huge movie buff" who'd arrived much earlier, had saved a row of seats for their group. "But I had four more friends coming to join us that night so I asked him and everyone if we could move two rows forward to accomodate my friends. So there is guilt there, asking people to have moved."

Describing the night, the trips to the concession stand, Soudani said they were having fun, just hanging out. "There was one individual sitting alone, not talking to anybody, just looking arond, with an extremely hollow look in his eyes," she said.

The movie started and Soudani and her friend Heather were laughing about something. "Her giggle was the last sound I heard," before her world changed irrevocably, she said.

The shooter went out the back door, she said. "I heard the sound of the door when he came back in and I didn’t think anything of it," she said. "All of a sudden you hear kind of this 'thunk' sound and see this canister go from front right into the crowd, towards my left. In my mind I’m thinking, 'Oh, no, someone is ruining my movie. We’ll have to leave, cops are going to be called', all the things. And then all of a sudden, I see flashes, and the flashes are just light. Sitting there for just a split second, hoping it will be firework or something. And then I realized it wasn’t fireworks."

Her friend Heather and Mike White Jr., who she had been dating at the time — White's father, Mike White, Sr., also attended the movie — pulled her down. "I’m in the fetal position, facing the screen. You have this much of seat in front of you for protection, there’s nothing blocking anything, and you just hear the shots being fired. There's nothing you can do. I'm a civilian, I had no training, I didn’t know how to react — so I just sat there. And then for a quick moment the shots stopped. And my first reaction was to get up and run."

She stood up. "All of a sudden my side was warm and I put my hand down and then I noticed that it was wet. At that time I realized that I was hit. I don’t know if I coughed or if it was the movement of going to reach and ask for help, but all of a sudden, my intestines came out. Thank goodness my hand was there because they started to spill and I caught them — and laid down. I told myself to stay calm."

Soudani's abdomen and calf were ripped open by schrapnel; she ultimately lost her spleen and a kidney and sustained three broken ribs and damage to her lungs and pancreas, according to reports.

"And so, I’m sitting there, laying there, and I don’t know why, but for some reason all I wanted was to take off my shoes," she said. "I slipped my shoe off my left foot but when I tried to do it for my right, I couldn’t understand why my leg didn’t have any strength. Then I saw my calf; it was hanging off," she said.

Describing that moment, Soudani said at some point, the lights turned on and an alarm started going off. "People were screaming. There was blood everywhere. Blood from the level above me, seeping down. My blood was going to the next level."

Mike White Sr. saw that she was hurt, she said. "He came over to me and hovered over me. He said, 'Honey, be as quiet as you can.' In my mind, I was thinking, 'Why would I be quiet? It hurts!' But as he was laying over me, the shooter was coming up the stairs into the crowd. Then the shots stopped and the only thing I could do was look at Mike and focus on his reactions, to get any idea of what was going on."

White ripped off his own shirt and put it against Soudani's side, to try and hold in her organs. White Sr.'s girlfriend was holding Soudani, "wiping the sweat off my face. She was trying to keep me awake, because all I wanted to do was close my eyes."

Although 12 died that night, Soudani said she and many also always count, too, the unborn baby who was also lost.

Speaking of how the night unfolded, she said: "When you're in such a traumatic event, every neuron in your brain is firing off, which is why is seems like slow motion. A minute span feels like an hour."

The little details remain; as she was being taken out on a backboard, she saw the nachos she'd ordered, uneaten, under her seat. "I got so mad they didn't grab them," she said. "They had extra jalapenos."

She can hear, still, one man saying, "Her organs are coming out," while another tightened White, Sr.'s shirt around her body. Those rushing to her aid, with no ambulance at the scene, struggled to get her into the back of a police car.

"Then they shut the door and we sped off and out of all that choas, all the mayhem," she said. "We were driving and I told him to roll down the window or I'd throw up. And I remember the sky. I don't know if it was the adrenaline, but the stars were so bright — and I held onto that."

The next thing Soudani saw was the hospital overhang. "I knew that I was safe," she said.

Telling her story is important, Soudani said, because training, and education, are critical to saving lives.

"One of the most treasured things I hold dear about that night is the flawless teamwork," she said. "It didn't matter if you were EMS or a police officer, everyone just shoved their egos to the side and just did it. It was poetry. Every person that left alive that night lived, made it to the hospital alive."

Fighting back teatrs, she said: "It was the most amazing teamwork you could have ever witnessed."

Speaking to Soudani, Riley said, "For you to be so severely injured and still be willing to talk about it is tribute to your courage and fortitude."

Mike Hawkins, Sergeant at Auroro, CO shooting

Riley, introducing Sgt. Mike Hawkins, who responded to the Aurora, CO movie theater shooting, said when it occurred on July 20, 2012, it was the largest mass shooting in American history at the time.

"There were problems coordinating law enforcement, fire, and EMS. Most of the victims and critically injured were transported to hospitals in the back of a police car. It was a miraculous example of problem solving. What they did that night was absolutelly miraculous. Farrah refers to them as her angels in blue. The lesson is to improvise, adapt, and overcome," he said.

Speaking to the first responders present in the audience, Hawkins said: "If you haven’t already, you need to start mentally preparing for this day. Without being Negative Nancy about it, it’s going to happen again somewhere next week."

Hawkins said he was already a pretty tenured and experienced police officer when he was called to that theater. "I had already seen my fair share of trauma and drama, homicides and accidents — and the really unfortunate things that we do to one another. The theater, though, was really over the top."

Hawkins said he has always liked World War II history and movies. "Sometimes people will ask me what the theater was like. What I would liken it to was the movie 'Saving Private Ryan.' It was like being medic on Omaha Beach — it was that ugly."

He added, his voice quiet with raw emotion: "You need to prepare yourself for sights and sounds like that. Seeing a pretty young lady, who just legitimately did not have it coming — seeing her intestines put back in her,you need to mentally prepare for that. You need to prepare for the footwells of police cars to be filled up and sloshing with blood. You need to mentally prepare for a little 6-year old-girl that . . you’re running as fast as you can, and you’re just not going to run fast enough, guys. That’s the stuff you need to mentally prepare for."

Veronica Moser-Sullivan, 6, was the youngest of the 12 who died at the theater that night, despite Hawkins' valiant efforts to save her.

Riley, after Hawkin spoke, added: "Mike's sentiments are really a call to action. A call to duty to act, to be prepared for that day. And never think that it's not coming to your town. Because there's no difference between Southold or Mattituck or Connecticut or Colorado. Our job is to battle complacency — because it absolutely can happen here. And this is a reminder that we all have a duty to act — and to know how to respond."

Brian Murphy, Sikh Temple shooting, Oak Creek, Wisconsin

Lt. Brian Murphy, shot 15 times at the Sikh Temple shooting in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, also spoke about the importance of preparing yourself. "The truth of the matter is, you don't get to pick when bad s--- happens. It picks you."

Studies have shown, he said, that, in the event of a crisis: "75 percent of the time, you will fall back to your training."

On August 5, 2012, Murphy was doing a day shift. "You couldn't pick Oak Creek, Wisconsin out of a map if I gave you 100 bucks," he said. "But within a year, I was at two active shooter events."

Preparedness, he said, is everything.

"You've got to play together well and if you’re the victim — and unfortunately, I was — I don’t want to hear your story. If I need the fire department there, I need you there now because now it's my life. The same with cops — you’ve got to be on the same page."

That morning, a man with ties to white supremacist groups went to the Sikh temple, "hellbent on killing," Murphy said. "He started out in the parking lot, shooting and killing two brothers. They'd seen him and invited him into the temple to have tea." He shot them in front of two children, Murphy said.

The children ran inside the temple and said, "'There's a guy outside with a gun and he's going to kill everyone,'" Murphy said.

The group split in half and went running in different directions, he said. "One lady says she's going to to the prayer area, that God was going to protect her," Murphy said. "He followed her inside that room and gunned her down."

The woman Paramjit Kaur, had a son, who recently became a sheriff, he said.

In total, six were killed, including the president of the temple Satwant Kaleka, and a visiting priest from India, he said.

When he pulled up, Murphy said he saw the two brothers; one had jumped on top of the other to try and save his life but the killer "shot right through the two of them," he said.

And then, Murpny said, pausing with emotion: "11 years later, and this s--- still gets me," he said. "42 years, running away, one-handed, he shoots and it hits me in the fricking chin. You couldn't hit that shot. Nobody here could hit that shot. Just trust me on that. But he clips me in the chin."

He added: "My immediate thought was, 'I'm in a gunfight, let's get it on.'"

Murphy was behind a car for a number of seconds and then stepped out and raised his gun; he was then shot in the thumb. "I'm looking at my thumb and I can see the bone. It was like what Farrah said, you get this slow motion thing going on."

The shots kept coming; Murphy was hit 15 times. He put on his bullet proof vest but the shooting continued, "boom, boom, boom."

Murphy said there was a moment when he was able to collect himself, close his eyes for a second. "I'm a huge believer that if you can control your breathing, you'll be fine. As soon as I close my eyes I see my wife Anne’s face, and once I see Anne’s face, I think of her and the kids, and in my head, I think, 'I'm not dying in a parking lot. Screw that.'"

The shooter reloaded his gun. "I'm looking up at him and there's nothing," Murphy said. "There's no agitation. No excitement. There's just business. The only thing I could think was, 'When are you going to be done shooting me?' Because he's shooting a lot and I wasn't going anywhere."

The final shot was to the back of Murphy's head. Next, his officers saw Murphy, engaged the shooter, and then shot him.

"He would have bled out so he put the gun to his head and killed himself," Murphy said.

Seven people, including the gunman, died that day, Murphy said. "We get wrapped up in numbers, how many were shot. I don't care if it's 1 or 100. I call it the power of 7. We lost 7 people but those people had 7 people and they had 7 people. When I was at the 10th anniversary last year, I was listening to these kids —and they were only kids when they lost parents, grandparents, loved ones. You see these kids get up and talk about how their dad would never seet them walk down the aisle, or graduate from college."

The Sikh temple incident took 6 minutes from beginning to end, Murphy said. "But these people live with it every single day."

He has to have Botox shots in his neck every three months. "This lasts for everybody. It doesn't go away," he said.

Bernie Meehan, Sandy Hook Elementary School, Newtown CT

Bernie Meehan, a self-described "fire guy, a paramedic forever," grew up in Newtown and was off duty on December 14, 2012. That shooting left left 28 people dead — including 20 students and six teachers— and 2 injured.

"It was a beautiful day," Meehan remembered. "I heard all the commotion going on and I called the duty paramedic supervisor and said, 'Are you listening to this? Something really bad is going on at Sandy Hook Elementary School. They're calling for a ton of EMS and no one's responding.'"

Meehan said he disagreed with others on some aspects of preparedness."I don't know if you can prepare yourself for what you are about to see," he said.

He pulled up to the Sandy Hook firehouse — the elementary school was located behind that building. "There wasn't much going on," Meehan said. "I asked, 'Is this a drill?'"

It wasn't.

"This is the real thing," he was told.

He and two other medics arrived at the school, all of them with about 30 years of experience. "Kids were still running out," he said. "No one had really trained for this yet. The term 'rescue task force' hadn't been coined yet."

One state police officer ran up, gun drawn. "He said, 'Come on, let's go.' It's not what we do. But we did," Meehan said. "We had one second to formulate a plan and then we stood up and ran across the school yard."

At the door, they were met by Will Chapman, a Newtown police officer and now sergeant.

"We were going down the hallway kicking 5 x 6 cartridges out of our way. The school stinks of gunpowder," Meehan said. "I went into one classroom and there was a pile of dead children."

Remembering, he continued. "A lot of these shootings are random shootings of a crowd from the distance. Sandy Hook was different because he pinned the kids down in a classroom — so it was more of a mass execution than a mass shooting."

A paramedic today for more than 40 years, Meehan spoke softly. "I wasn't ready for what I saw."

They did a quick triage, but he explained that wasn't really the correct word; nothing could be done. "There was no actual point in that room," he said.

In the next room, they found the shooter. "He was obviously dead," he said. "He shot himself. These people are typically cowards. And there was another pile of children and teachers. The administrators were further down the hall."

Meehan said he made the decision to stay inside the building for seven long hours. "We went through every single victim in that school."

He made the decision rather than send in newer, younger paramedics. "I knew it would ruin their careers," he said. "Any EMS fire person invariably asks, 'What's the worst thing you've ever seen?' You don't want to know. You just don't. This is about as much as I've talked about this, since that day."

Today, there are rescue tasks force; Meehan commended the active shooter trainings he's attended, including those where he met Riley.

"You need to have an integrated response," Riley said. "There are no more excuses. The only way to solve this problem is to work together. That's the importance of training."

Path to healing

Riley also asked the panel about what in their lives had helped them to heal, since the shootings.

Woodruff said it took her about 10 years to find peace after Columbine. "People didn't understand then what trauma was. Trauma is its own bed of healing that has to be worked through."

Due to Columbine and the shootings since, a stronger look at mental health and the lasting impacts of trauma have been studied, she said. She suffered with depression, insomnia, PTSD, and survivor's guilt.

"And, of course, grief. I went to five funerals in one week as a 17-year-old," Woodruff said. "The empty chairs, the empty tables. I was a junior, so my class was more shot up than any other."

Woodruff said the focus on her own healing came later as she wanted to help care for her best friend. "Her mother committed suicide at the 6-month anniversary (of Columbine)," she said.

"I realize I needed help, too, because I didn’t want to go down that path," Woodruff said.

Eventually, she pursued therapy, but at that point in time, grief counseling, different than trauma, was all that was available. She found healing through tai chi and learned to process her triggers, which include gunshots, balloons, fireworks. "There are the ones you don't think of. The smell of lilacs — because I went home after school and my mother's lilacs were in bloom."

Today, she has worked through each and every one of her triggers. "I don't have them anymore," she said.

Soudani's journey to healing was "ugly," she said; she turned to drinking and cocaine to numb the pain. By the end of 2013, she was readying to move and was cleaning her room and she found about two dozen baggies, with a bit of cocaine in each.

"I realized if I kept doing this, I wasn't going to see my nieces grow up. They are my life. That was it. I quit," she said.

She began seeing a trauma specialist; Soudani said she is grateful that there were 13 or 14 survivors from her shooting that were able to share the experience with her.

"It took me two years to cry for the first time about the theater," she said. "But I had an advantage, because I had known everyone who was there with me for years, we had that friendship and closeness before. We were able to truly lean on each other and support each other. If it wasn't for the people I was with, I would not be here, plain and simple."

Soudani said something else helped, too, keeping in touch with her "angels in blue" and "angels in scrubs."

When she got hurt that night, Soudani said she believe she died. "I was dead for 3.5 minutes. What I saw was my version of heaven. It was the most euphoric, peaceful light. When I came back, it was hard. I wasn't suicidal. — I didn't want to commit the act — but I didn’t want to be alive because what I saw was just so beautiful and pure."

But her nieces kept her grounded; they warmed her heart, she said.

And last year, she was introduced to scuba diving and found her purpose for living, she said. "Finding purpose for me was one of the hardest things. You have to keep trying until you find it."

Hawkins found himself experiencing anger and anxiety after the event. By late 2017 his supervisor told him that he needed to decide to medically rehabilitate or medially retire; another police psychologist deemed him unfit for duty. "From there, I made the intelligent decision to medically retire with the diagnosis of PTSD," he said. "To supervisors in this room, please recognize if you have men and women coming out of an incident like this, no matter what they tell you about how okay they are — they're not okay."

He added: "My journey has been long." But meeting on the anniversary night last year, it was a turning point. "I could admit that I was a psychological injury from that night."

Murphy said he found it hard to accept how life could change in a heartbeat. "For 30 years I was wearing a gun and you go to work one day and then all of it's gone. Everything you worked for, everything you did . . . "

Another issue is that police and first responders take care of others first, putting themselves on the back burner. One thing he feels he should have done was to share with his wife, what he was going through. It was only when at a 2012 blood drive, when he spoke with a relative of one of those killed in the Sikh attack that he realized he needed to talk more about his experience, express what he'd been holding back. Not talking can lead to high divorce rates among police officers and other first responders, he said. " Every day of your life as a first responder, happens to your family."

His wife gave him a book of mediations that has helped, he said.

He also needed to share with others who'd been through similar experiences.

"I could bill a house with all the plaques I've got. I needed somebody who’s been though something similar that I could talk to," he said.

He was able to help others in that capacity, working with Armor Express, a Michigan-based company that makes ballistic armor for law enforcement, by managing the Saves Program, which helps law enforcement and their families share their experiences.

Meehan said after Sandy Hook, he didn't sleep well at all for 28 days.

After Sandy Hook, he said: "No one wanted to come near us. Everyone knew what really happened in there, but no one wanted to envision it — to a bunch of 5 and 6 year olds."

At first, Meehan said he thought no one could help him. But colleagues urged him to counseling and eventually, he found a trauma-informed therapist and was launched into a journey of giving back to others.

"I'm a big advocate now," he said. "You have to help each other. The one thing my therapist taught me is that we carry two buckets. One's got the good, and one's got the bad. If you keep filling up the good bucket, it offsets the bad."