Everything was going well. In fact, it seemed like a rather ordinary day. Days such as these always do. My brother, Joe, was home visiting our mom. They had decided to go to the mall so he could finally get the automatic car starter installed that he had promised her for her birthday and for Mother’s Day. The whole process would take some time, and so they decided to wander around. I would have been there too, except obligations at school kept me away, and so I would only receive texts from Joe, teasing me about the different stores they went in.
As you can imagine, I was quite jealous, but I had bigger things to be concerned about. My roommate had let me borrow her car to do the grocery shopping, and I was determined to get our food and get back to campus so I could practice. I almost made it, but then I got a text from my mom as I was leaving Wegmans, and that’s when a seemingly ordinary day started to turn into something much worse.
Once I got all of my groceries in the car, my phone started to go off. It was my mom, and she was in tears. It wasn’t a medical emergency that had triggered the lockdown, it was something much worse. There were people in the mall shooting. After seeing the police storm in the entrance by Unos carrying assault rifles, my mom and brother were led out the back emergency exit and were now standing in the parking lot outside. They couldn’t go anywhere, as the car was still being worked on. All they could do was wait and call family.
Upon hanging up, I cried. There was nothing else I could do. I wanted to be home. I wanted to take my roommate’s car and drive the three and a half hours back to Albany and rescue my family from the mall, but I couldn’t. I had a class to attend. I had donors to go appreciate. I had a concert to play in. Besides that, I knew I was in no shape to drive that distance.
When I finally returned to my apartment, I started to text my best friend, Amy. I just needed someone to talk to. Someone who would hopefully calm me down.
Of course, I had some feelings of guilt. I had been planning on being there, but I knew that my schooling was more important. I couldn’t help feeling completely helpless. In that moment there was absolutely nothing I could do, and that was killing me. I knew they were safe, but I had no idea if our car was safe. After all, I had read that the shooter was in Best Buy.
However, when I mentioned this to Joe, he replied with information that he had learned from the mall employees. According to what they had heard, there were a total of three shooters in the Apple Store, and one of them had been killed.
Things continued to escalate. As if it weren’t enough to have police armed with assault rifles in the mall, SWAT teams arrived on buses. That was when I knew things were really serious.
Of course, there were other factors as well. My mom had mentioned that there were students she knew inside the mall doing a fundraiser. All I could think of was how devastated she, as well as the rest of her school community, would be if anything happened to them.
I knew I wasn’t the only one freaking out about this. Plenty of my friends work in Crossgates. I felt relief at knowing that they were all safe and that they had even taken responsibility for the people in their stores and made sure they were safe as well. There were also other people freaking out for the people who were there. Amy was terrified that her mom had also gone to the mall, as she usually went there on Saturdays. Thankfully, she didn’t go.
In the end, Amy and I were left wondering what this world had come to. Sure, we had discussed shootings before, but none of them had ever hit so close to home. None of them had affected people we knew and cared about. Seeing something of this magnitude through that light has been such an eye-opening experience. I found that my own terror and fear forced me to reflect upon what families of these tragedies must feel, and I felt as though I only experienced a small fraction of what they experience.
