ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø News and KCUR followed the stories of people injured during the Feb. 14, 2024, mass shooting at the Kansas City Chiefs Super Bowl celebration. As the one-year mark since the parade shooting nears, the last installment in our series “The Injured” looks at how some survivors talk about resilience, while others are desperately trying to hang on.

Emily Tavis was on a first date in December when she looked up and realized they were driving past the downtown Kansas City, Missouri, intersection where a bullet ripped through her leg at last year’s Super Bowl victory parade.

“Oh f—,” Tavis said, bewildering her date.

She lives 35 miles away in Leavenworth, Kansas, and hadn’t yet returned to Union Station, where the mass shooting happened. She felt like crying. Or maybe it was a panic attack. She held up a finger signaling to her date that she needed a moment. That’s when it hit him, too.

“Oh crap, I didn’t even realize,” he said, and kept driving in silence.

Tavis sucked in her tears until the station was out of view.

“So anyway,” she said aloud, while thinking to herself, “way to go. Panic attack, first date.”

A year after the Feb. 14 shooting that killed one and injured at least 24 people, the survivors and their families are still reeling. Relationships have strained. Parents are anxious about their children. The generous financial support and well wishes that poured through in early days have now dried up. And they’re ambivalent about the team they all root for; as the Chiefs moved on to another Super Bowl, many wondered why their beloved team hasn’t acknowledged what they have all been going through.

“I can’t believe the Chiefs didn’t do anything for us,” said Jacob Gooch Sr., who was shot in the foot. The team, the owner family’s foundation, and the National Football League gave a combined $200,000 to a fund for survivors, but Gooch said no one from the organization reached out to his family, three members of whom were shot.

What’s happening to these families is far from unusual. Many survivors emotionally freeze as a coping mechanism to avoid fully feeling the trauma they suffered. But with time, survivors experience what therapists call “thawing,” and the intensity of what happened can suddenly overpower them like it did Tavis.

“Trauma pulls us into the past,” said , a therapist who published a based on his work with witnesses of the 9/11 attacks in New York.

Sights, smells, sounds, tastes, and touches can all trigger flashbacks that shut down the brain like an overloaded circuit breaker. It’s a survival response, Behrman said; the brain is a friend.

The key to recovery is to help survivors find healthy ways to manage those triggers — when they are ready.

Survivors thaw at their own pace. Regaining control after a life-threatening event is a process that can take weeks, months, or years.

It can be hard not to feel forgotten when life carries on around them. As fans rallied around the Chiefs this season, survivors found it hard to watch the games. The Chiefs lost to the Philadelphia Eagles in Sunday’s Super Bowl. Philadelphia will hold its own parade on Friday, exactly one year after the shooting.

“It sucks because everybody else went on,” Jason Barton said. He performed CPR on a man he now thinks was one of the alleged shooters, his wife found a bullet slug in her backpack, and his stepdaughter was burned by sparks from a ricocheted bullet.

“If we were on the other side of that place, we would too,” he said. “It wouldn’t have affected us.”

A Trip Back to Union Station

Tavis isn’t the only survivor to have found herself unintentionally back at Union Station in the year since the shooting. Kids had field trips to Science City, located inside the station. Follow-up doctor visits were often on nearby Hospital Hill. An October dinner organized for survivors by a local faith-based group was less than a mile away, prompting one young survivor to decline the invitation.

Tavis had planned to return to Union Station as part of her healing process. She thought she would go on the one-year mark to have a moment alone to feel whatever emotions swept over her there.

Maybe God was showing her she was ready by placing her back there unexpectedly, her therapist told her. Maybe. But she didn’t feel ready in that moment.

Tavis wanted to see a therapist right after the shooting. But she didn’t seek one out until July, after the local United Way distributed financial assistance to survivors and relieved the months-long financial strain of lost work and medical bills incurred by many. Tavis and her partner at the time had taken out an extra credit card to cover expenses while they waited for the promised help.

After two months of visits, her therapist started prepping Tavis for eye movement desensitization and reprocessing, a technique to help trauma survivors. She now spends every other session making her way through a spreadsheet of memories from the parade, visualizing and reprocessing them one by one.

She’s nervous as the one-year mark approaches. It’s on Valentine’s Day, and she worries it’ll be depressing.

She decided to invite Gooch, her former partner, to come to Union Station with her that day. Despite everything, he’s the one who understands. They were at the parade together with their son and Jacob’s two older kids. Both Gooch Sr. and his older son, Jacob Gooch Jr., were also shot.

Trauma Changes Who We Are

Gooch Sr. hasn’t worked since the parade. His job required standing for 10-hour shifts four days a week, but he couldn’t walk for months after a bullet shattered a bone in his foot and it slowly fused back together. He hoped to go back to work in July. But his foot didn’t heal correctly and he had surgery in August, followed by weeks of recovery.

His short-term disability ran out, as did his health insurance through work. His employer held his job for a while before releasing him in August. He’s applied for other jobs in and around Leavenworth: production, staffing agencies, auto repair. Nothing’s come through.

“We’ve all gone through problems, not just me,” Gooch Sr. said. “I got shot in my foot and haven’t worked for a year. There are people that have been through much worse stuff over the past year.”

He feels good walking now and can run short distances without pain. But he doesn’t know if he’ll ever play football again, a mainstay of his life since he can remember. He played safety for the semiprofessional and, before the parade, the 38-year-old was considering making the 2024 season his last as a player.

“A lot more than football has been stolen from me in this last year. Like my whole life has been stolen from me,” Gooch Sr. said. “I really hate that part of it.”

And those emotions are painfully real. Trauma threatens our beliefs about ourselves, said Behrman, the therapist. Every person brings their own history to a traumatic event, a different identity that risks being shattered. The healing work that comes later often involves letting go and building something new.

Recently Gooch Sr. started going to a , led by the husband of someone he sang with in a children’s choir growing up. At a Sunday service this month, the pastor spoke about finding a path when you’re lost.

“I’m looking for the path. I’m in the grass right now,” Gooch Sr. said at his home later that evening.

“I’m obviously on a path, but I don’t know where I’m headed.”

‘I Did the Best I Could’

Every day before Jason Barton goes to work, he asks his wife, Bridget, if he should stay home with her.

She’s said yes enough that he’s out of paid time off. Jason, who’s survived cancer and a heart attack, had to take unpaid leave in January when a bad case of the flu put him in the hospital. That’s real love, Bridget said with tearful eyes, sitting with Jason and her 14-year-old daughter, Gabriella, in their home in Osawatomie, Kansas.

Bridget has connected with the mother of another girl injured in the shooting. They’ve exchanged texts and voicemails throughout the year. It’s nice to have someone to talk to who gets it, Bridget said. They’re hoping to get the girls together to build a connection as well.

Except for a trip to therapy once a week, Bridget doesn’t leave the house much anymore. It can feel like a prison, she said, but she’s too scared to leave. “It’s my own internal hell,” she said. She keeps thinking about that bullet slug that lodged in her backpack. What if she’d been standing differently? What if they’d left 10 seconds earlier? Would things be different?

A Post-it note in her kitchen reminds her: “I’m safe. Gabriella is safe. I did the best I could.”

She carries a lot of guilt. About Jason staying home. About not leaving the house, even to see her grandkids. About wanting the family to go to the parade in the first place. At the same time, she knows she kind of thrived in the chaos after the shooting, taking charge of her daughter, talking to the police. It’s confusing.

The family has carried the trauma differently. In the six months after the parade, Jason watched reality TV shows that kept him out of his head — 23 seasons of “Deadliest Catch” and 21 seasons of “Gold Rush,” including spinoffs, he estimated. Lately he’s kept his mind occupied with a new hobby: building model cars and planes. He just finished a black 1968 Shelby Mustang, and next is an F4U-4 Corsair plane that Bridget got him.

Gabriella was unfazed about returning to Union Station for a class field trip to Science City, but she was startled when she saw a group of police officers inside the station. Her mom watched her location on her phone and texted her all day.

Gabriella took up boxing after the parade, then switched to wrestling. It had been going well, even felt empowering. But she’s stopped going, and Bridget thinks it’s partly due to the emotion of the anniversary — the first is always the hardest, her therapist said. Gabriella insisted that wrestling was just exhausting her.

Because they weren’t shot, the family didn’t benefit from resources available to other survivors. They understand that other families are recovering from bullet wounds or even mourning a death.

Still, it would be nice to have some acknowledgment of their emotional trauma. Their names have been in the news. You’d think the Chiefs would have at least sent a letter saying, “We’re sorry this happened to you,” Jason said.

Jason proposed to Bridget at a Chiefs game. Now watching games on TV triggers flashbacks.

“I want to be a part of Chiefs Kingdom again,” Bridget said, “but I just can’t. And that is a huge, really lonely feeling.”

‘There Is a Word Called “Resilience”’

One evening last October, survivors gathered with their families at a Mexican restaurant in downtown Kansas City.

Some came dressed in their Sunday best, some in red football jerseys. All ages, toddlers to 70-somethings, some from Missouri, some from Kansas. Some spoke only Spanish, some only English. Most of the two dozen people had never met before. But as they talked, they discovered the shooting that binds them also gave them a common language.

Two young boys realized they’d tossed a football during the jubilation before the violence erupted. A woman in her early 70s named Sarai Holguin remembered watching them play on that warm February day. After a blessing and dinner, Holguin, who was shot in the knee and has had four surgeries, stood to address the room.

“I was the first victim taken to the medical tent,” she said in Spanish, her words translated by a relative of another survivor. She saw everything, she explained, as, one by one, more survivors were brought to the tent for treatment, including Lisa Lopez-Galvan, a 43-year-old mother who was killed that day.

Yet in that tragedy, Holguin saw the beauty of people helping one another.

“This showed us that humanity is still alive, that love is still alive. There is a word called ‘resilience,’” Holguin said, the translator stumbling to understand the last word, as people in the audience caught it and shouted it out. “Resilience.”

“This word helps us overcome the problems we face,” Holguin said. “To try to put the tragic moment we all lived behind us and move on, we must remember the beautiful moments.”

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ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø News and KCUR are following the stories of people injured during the Feb. 14 mass shooting at the Kansas City Chiefs Super Bowl celebration. Listen to how survivors are seeking a sense of safety.

KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Twenty-four minutes before the mass shooting at the Kansas City Chiefs Super Bowl victory parade in February left one person dead and at least 24 people injured, Jenipher Cabrera felt a bullet pierce the back of her right thigh.

The 20-year-old and her family were just four blocks from Union Station, in a river of red-shirted Chiefs fans walking toward the massive rally after the parade that warm Valentine’s Day. The bullet — fired by teen boys fighting in the street — thrust Cabrera forward.

She grabbed her mom by the shoulder and signaled in panic to her bleeding leg with her large brown eyes, not saying a word. Cabrera was being treated in an ambulance when she heard reports blasting from the police radio.

“My mom was trying to get on the ambulance,” Cabrera said. “I remember them saying, like, ‘You can’t get on. There might be other victims that we need to pick up.’”

Cabrera’s shooting happened before the one that garnered the big headlines that day and is one of hundreds that kill or injure Kansas City-area residents each year. That endless drumbeat of gun violence — from one-off incidents to mass shootings — has shattered the sense of safety for those who survive. As victims and their families try to move forward, reminders of gun violence are inescapable in the media, in their communities, in their daily lives.

“I look at people differently,” said James Lemons, who was shot in the thigh at the rally. Now when he’s around strangers he can’t help but wonder if they have a gun and if his kids are safe.

The new NFL season opened here for Lisa Lopez-Galvan, the only person killed at the parade. Kansas City has recorded at least this year. Local police say there have been an additional 527 “bullet-to-skin victims” — people who were shot and survived. And there were nationwide by mid-September.

Collectively it is all taking a toll.

Survivors suffer panic attacks and feel a heightened sense of danger in crowds and deep anxieties about the threat of violence anywhere in Kansas City.

Every shooting survivor responds in their own way to gun violence and even the threat of it, according to LJ Punch, a trauma surgeon by training and founder of the Bullet Related Injury Clinic in St. Louis.

For some, getting shot ensures they will always be on guard, perhaps even armed. Others want nothing to do with guns ever again.

“But what’s the common ground? That people desperately want to be safe,” Punch said.

Cabrera’s search to make meaning out of what happened has led her to work with a frustrated local lawmaker seeking new gun laws — something akin to impossible given Missouri state law, which on firearms.

Learning of Other Shootings on the Phone

Feb. 14 is a movie in Cabrera’s mind, in slow motion, frame by frame, and the soundtrack is her voice, talking and talking. She sees a group of rowdy teenage boys running around her and her family. Then two pops — fireworks? Another pop. Finally, a fourth.

“I think that’s where the shock kicked in, and I grabbed my mom,” Cabrera remembered. “I didn’t say anything to her. I just, like, looked at her, and I had, like, my eyes were widened, and I kind of signaled with my eyes to look down at my leg.”

Cabrera fell and other fans rushed to her rescue, calling 911, and began cutting off her leggings. Four men instantly pulled off their belts when asked for a tourniquet. She remembers thinking that if she lost consciousness, she could die. So she talked and talked. Or so she thought.

One of her rescuers later said she actually didn’t say a word even when he asked how many fingers he was holding up.

“He told me [that] my eyes were huge, like oranges, and that all I was basically doing was, like, looking up and down four times since he had four fingers up,” Cabrera said.

Cabrera remembers being moved out of the emergency room at University Health to make room for from the shooting at the rally, including eight with gunshot wounds. She checked social media on her phone — another shooting? Unreal. Finally her parents found her. She spent seven days in the hospital.

Cabrera is grateful to be alive. But she is triggered now when she sees groups of teenage boys cursing and playing, or when she sees red Chiefs shirts. Hearing four pops in a row — a regular occurrence in her northeast Kansas City neighborhood — makes Cabrera’s chest swell and she braces for a panic attack.

“It runs over and over and over and over in my mind,” she said.

‘An Increasing Sense of Threat?’

The U.S. surgeon general declared gun violence a public health crisis in June, but nearly any new regulation on guns is a political nonstarter in Missouri. In fact, a 2021 state law — signed at where one of the weapons used in the parade shooting was purchased — would have barred local police from enforcing federal gun laws. The law was by a federal appeals court in August.

Missouri has no age restrictions on gun use and possession, although federal law largely prohibits juveniles from carrying handguns.

Polling of Missouri voters for requiring background checks and instituting age restrictions for gun purchases, but also nearly half were counties and cities to pass their own gun rules.

Per capita, Kansas City, Missouri, is among the more violent places in the nation. From 2014 to 2023, there were in this city of 510,000, leaving 1,275 people dead and 1,624 injured. And while in more than 100 cities across the country last year, Kansas City recorded its .

Punch, of the Bullet Related Injury Clinic, likened the violence to a disease outbreak that goes unaddressed and spreads. The state’s permissive posture toward guns might supercharge the reality in Kansas City, Punch said, but it didn’t start it.

“So is there something going on? Is there an increasing sense of threat?” Punch asked.

Jason Barton was familiar with that violence growing up in Kansas City. Now settled in Osawatomie, Kansas, he thought long and hard about bringing his own gun for protection when he drove his family to the Super Bowl parade.

Ultimately he decided against it, surmising that if something happened and he pulled out a gun, he would be arrested or shot.

Barton responded quickly to the shooting, which happened right in front of him and his family. His wife found a bullet in her backpack. His stepdaughter’s legs were burned by sparks from a bullet ricochet.

Despite his worst fears coming true, Barton said not bringing his gun that day was the right decision.

“Guns don’t need to be brought into places like that,” he said.

‘A 12-Gauge With Teeth’

Mass shootings can derail survivors’ sense of safety, according to Heather Martin, a survivor of the Columbine High School shooting in 1999 and co-founder of , which provides peer support to survivors of mass trauma.

“Trying to find a way to feel safe again is very common,” Martin said, “in the years following it.”

James Lemons had always felt trepidation about returning to Kansas City, where he grew up. He even brought his gun with him to the parade but left it in the car at the urging of his wife. His 5-year-old daughter was on his shoulders when a bullet entered the back of his thigh. He shielded her from the ground as he fell. What was he realistically going to do with a gun?

And yet he can’t help but wonder “what if.” He can’t shake the feeling that he failed to protect his family. Waking up from dreams about the parade, “I just start crying,” he said. He knows he hasn’t processed it yet but he doesn’t know how to start. He has focused on his family’s safety.

They got two American bulldogs this summer, making three total in the house now — one for each kid. Lemons described them as “like having a gun without having a gun.”

“I’ve got a 12-gauge with teeth,” Lemons joked, “just a big, softy protector.”

Most nights he sleeps only a few hours at a time before waking up to check on the kids. Usually he’s on the couch. It’s more comfortable for his leg that is still healing, and it helps him avoid the restless kicks of his 5-year-old, who has slept with her parents since the parade.

It also ensures he’ll be the one to intercept an intruder who breaks into the house.

Emily Tavis, who was shot through the leg, found solace at her church and from a sister congregation’s in-house therapist.

But then, the Sunday morning after the Donald Trump rally shooting in July, the preacher’s sermon turned to gun violence — triggering panic inside her.

“And it just, like, overwhelmed me so much, where I just went to the bathroom,” Tavis said, “and I just stayed in the bathroom for the rest of the sermon.” Now even attending church gives her pause.

Tavis recently moved into a new house in Leavenworth, Kansas, that she is renting from a friend. The friend’s husband cautioned that if Tavis was going to be alone she needed a gun for protection. She told him she just can’t deal with guns right now.

“And he’s like, ‘OK, well, take this.’ And he pulls out this giant machete,” Tavis recalled, laughing.

“So I have a machete now.”

A Search for Something Good

Cabrera, the young woman who couldn’t speak after being shot, is now trying to use her voice in the fight against gun violence.

Manny Abarca, a Jackson County, Missouri, legislator, lives down the street. One evening, he came to visit. Cabrera’s parents did most of the talking; she’s shy by nature. But then he turned and asked her directly: What did she want?

“I just want, like, some justice for my case,” she said, “or something good to happen.”

Before the parade, Cabrera was offered a factory job where her sister worked, but she hadn’t started because her leg was still healing. So Abarca offered her an internship, helping him establish a Jackson County Office of Gun Violence Prevention, a plan he introduced in July in response to the parade shootings.

Abarca was in the Chiefs victory parade with his 5-year-old daughter, Camila. They were in Union Station when shots were fired — and they huddled in a downstairs bathroom.

“I just said, ‘Hey, you know, just be calm. Just be quiet. Let’s just find out what’s going on. Something’s happened,’” Abarca said. “And then she said, ‘This is a drill.’ And hey, it tore everything out of me, because I was like, she’s referring to her training” at school.

They emerged shaken but safe, only to learn that Lopez-Galvan had died. Abarca knew the 43-year-old mother and popular Tejano DJ through the area’s tight-knit Hispanic community.

Abarca has taken advantage of this heated time after the Super Bowl parade shootings to work on anti-violence measures, despite knowing the severe limitations posed by state law.

In June, the Jackson County Legislature passed a measure that gives local teeth to a federal domestic violence law that allows judges to remove firearms from offenders.

While Abarca was able to get a gun violence office approved, county officials vetoed another measure that would establish age limits for purchasing or possessing firearms, fearing a lawsuit from a combative state attorney general. He hired Cabrera, he said, because she is bilingual and he wants her help as a survivor.

In a sense, the work makes Cabrera feel stronger in her fight to move forward from the shooting. Still, her family’s perception of safety has been shattered, and no one will be attending games or a possible Super Bowl victory parade anytime soon.

“We just never expected something like that to happen,” she said. “And so I think we’re gonna be more cautious now and maybe just watch it through TV.”

[Update: This article was revised at 5 p.m. ET on Nov. 14, 2024, to reflect news developments.]

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ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø News and KCUR are following the stories of people injured during the Feb. 14 mass shooting at the Kansas City Chiefs Super Bowl celebration. Listen to how children wounded that day are dealing with their injuries or emotional scars.

Six months after Gabriella Magers-Darger’s legs were burned by sparks from a ricocheted bullet at the Kansas City Chiefs Super Bowl parade in February, the 14-year-old is ready to leave the past behind.

She is dreading the pitfalls of being a high school freshman, even as she looks forward to being back with friends and at color guard, dance, and volleyball. She might even join the wrestling team to get some respect at school.

But the past remains ever present.

At a July Fourth gathering, a family friend brought noise-canceling headphones in case the fireworks became too much. Earlier in the summer Gabriella had a hard time viewing a relative’s gun collection, the handguns in particular. And she hyperventilated when she saw a family friend’s finger after it was sliced by accident — the sight of blood reminds her of seeing a fatally wounded Lisa Lopez-Galvan minutes after she was shot outside Union Station, the only person killed that day.

Her mom, Bridget Barton, said Gabriella has had a chip on her shoulder since the parade.

“She’s lost some softness to her, some gentleness to her,” Barton said.

Children are particularly vulnerable to the stresses of gun violence, and 10 of 24 people injured by bullets at the Feb. 14 parade were under 18 years old. Countless more children like Gabriella experienced the trauma firsthand. They’ve endured fear, anger, sleep problems, and hypersensitivity to crowds and noises.

A 15-year-old girl who was shot through the jaw and shoulder effectively dropped out of school for a time and daily panic attacks kept her from summer school, too. An 11-year-old boy shot in the side described feeling angry at school for reasons he couldn’t explain. A 5-year-old girl who was on her father’s shoulders when he was hit by gunfire panics each time her dad feels sick, fearing he has been shot again.

“She’s not the same kid. I mean, she’s definitely not,” said Erika Nelson, mother of the 15-year-old, Mireya, who has scars on her jaw and face. “You never know when she’s going to snap. You never know. You might say something or someone might bring up something that reminds her of that day.”

Guns overtook motor vehicle accidents as the leading cause of death for children in 2020, but a far higher number of kids are hit by gunfire and survive. that kids sustain nonfatal firearm injuries anywhere fromtwo to four times more often than they are killed by guns.

Scientists say the long-term effects of gun violence on kids are little researched and poorly understood. But the harm is pervasive. Harvard and Massachusetts General Hospital that during the first year after a firearm injury, child survivors experienced a 117% increase in pain disorders, a 68% increase in psychiatric disorders, and a 144% increase in substance use disorders. The mental health effects spill over — to mothers, fathers, siblings.

For many affected by the shooting in Kansas City, Missouri, the triggers began right away.

‘I Get Mad Easily’

Just 10 days after Samuel Arellano was shot at the parade, he attended another big sporting event.

Samuel was invited to attend a University of Kansas men’s basketball game at Allen Fieldhouse in Lawrence. During a break in the game, with a and his parents, former KU star Jalen Wilson appeared on the scoreboard and addressed him directly.

“I heard about your story,” Wilson, who now plays in the NBA, said on the big screen. “I’m so very thankful that you are here today and it is a blessing that we can have you to give you the love and support you truly deserve.”

Wilson asked the 16,000 fans in attendance to stand and give Samuel a round of applause. As the crowd clapped and an announcer bellowed about him being a “brave young man,” Samuel looked at his parents, then down at his feet, smiling shyly.

But minutes later when the game resumed, Samuel started to cry and had to leave the auditorium with his mom, Abigail.

“When it got pretty loud, that’s when he started breaking up again,” his dad, Antonio, said. “So she had to step out with him for a minute. So any loud places, if it’s too loud, it’s affecting him.”

Samuel, who turned 11 in March, was shot in the ribs on his right side. The scar on his back is barely noticeable now, but lingering effects from the parade shooting are obvious. He is seeing a therapist — as is his father, though Abigail has had a tough time finding a Spanish-speaking one and still hasn’t had an appointment.

Samuel had trouble sleeping in the first weeks after the shooting and often crawled in bed with his mom and dad. He used to get good grades, but that became more difficult, Abigail said. His personality has changed, which sometimes has shown up at school.

“I get mad easily,” Samuel said. “I [have] never been like this before but like, if they tell me to sit down, I get mad. I don’t know why.”

Traumatized children often have difficulty expressing emotions and may be given to outbursts of anger, according to , a professor of social work at Ohio State University.

“I’m sure for that child there is a sense of tremendous injustice about what happened,” Johnson-Motoyama said.

Especially right after the shooting, Samuel had panic attacks, Antonio said, and he’d break out in a sweat. Therapists told them that was normal. But the parents also kept him off his phone for a while, as there was so much about the shooting on the news and online.

Abigail, who works at a car dealership with Antonio, is anxious about seeing her son change, his suffering and sadness. She is also concerned for her three daughters, a 16-year-old and 13-year-old twins. Her father, Victor Salas, who was with Samuel at the parade, was also reeling in its aftermath.

“I’m crying and crying and crying about what happened,” Salas said in Spanish four days after the parade. “Because it was chaos. It doesn’t mean that families don’t love their family, but everyone took off to save their own lives. I saved my grandchildren’s lives, but what happens to the rest of the people? We’re not prepared.”

On the good side, Samuel felt very supported by the community in Kansas City, Kansas. Many people from his school stopped by in the first few days to visit, including friends and even a former bus driver, who was in tears. He has a “room full of candy,” Abigail said, mostly Skittles, his favorite.

An autographed football from Kansas City Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes arrived on his birthday. It made him cry, his father said, which happens pretty often.

“There are good and bad days, days that are more normal and easier, and then there are days where the family has to be a little bit more aware and supportive,” Abigail said in Spanish. “He’s always been outgoing and talkative like his mom, but that has changed since the parade.”

Fourth of July a Weeklong Trigger

The Fourth of July was particularly harrowing for many of the young survivors and their families. Should they buy fireworks? Will they want to celebrate? And why do all the firecrackers going off in the neighborhood sound like gunshots?

Fourteen-year-old Gabriella needed help from her stepfather, Jason Barton, to light her fireworks this year, something she is ordinarily enthusiastic about doing herself. At the parade, like many people, the Barton family initially mistook the sound of gunfire for fireworks.

And Erika Nelson, a single mom in Belton, Missouri, feared even bringing up the holiday with Mireya, who has always loved Independence Day. Eventually Mireya said she didn’t want any big fireworks this year and wanted only her mom to set theirs off.

“Just any little trigger — I mean, it could be a light crackle — and she just clenched,” Erika Nelson said.

Patty Davis, a program manager for trauma-informed care at Children’s Mercy hospital in Kansas City, said even her clients who were at the parade but were not injured still flinch at the sounds of sirens or other loud noises. It’s a powerful response to gun violence, she said.

“So not just an accidental trauma,” she said, “but a trauma that was perpetrated for violent purposes, which can cause an increased level of anxiety for persons around that to wonder if it’s going to happen again. And how safe are they?”

Reliving Getting Shot

Random sounds, bright lights, and crowds can catch the kids and their parents off guard. In June, Mireya Nelson was waiting for her older sister after a dance recital, hoping to see a boy she knew give a flower to a girl everyone said he had a crush on. Her mom wanted to go, but Mireya shushed her.

“Then all of a sudden, there was a loud boom,” Erika said. “She dropped low to the ground. And then she jumped back up. She goes, ‘Oh my God, I was getting shot again!’”

Mireya said it so loudly people were staring, so it was Erika’s turn to shush her and try to soothe her.

“I was like, ‘Mireya, it’s OK. You’re all right. They dropped a table. They’re just moving stuff out. It was an accident,’” Erika said.

It took a few minutes for the shock to wear off and Mireya later giggled about it, but Erika is always on watch.

Her daughter’s early sadness — she watched movies for hours, crying throughout — has since changed to a cheekiness. Half a year later, Mireya will joke about the shooting, which tears her mother up. But maybe that is part of the healing process, Erika says.

Before the Fourth of July, Mireya went to Worlds of Fun, a large amusement park, and had a good time. She felt OK because there were security guards everywhere. She also enjoyed a visit to the local FBI office with a friend who was with her the day of the shooting. But when someone suggested a trip to the ballet, Mireya squashed it quickly — it’s near Union Station, the site of the shooting. She doesn’t want to go downtown anymore.

Erika said the doctor appointments and financial strains have been a lot to juggle and that her biggest frustration as a parent is that she’s not able to fix things for her daughter.

“They have to go their own way, their own process of healing. I can’t shake her, like, ‘Get back to yourself,’” Erika said. “It could take months, years. Who knows? It could be the rest of her life. But I hope that she can overcome a little bit of it.”

Goose Bumps in the Sweltering Heat

James Lemons noticed a change in his 5-year-old daughter, Kensley, who was on his shoulders when he was shot at the parade. Before the shooting Kensley was outgoing and engaged, James said, but now she is withdrawn, like she has closed off her bubble and disconnected from people.

Large crowds and police officers remind Kensley of the parade. Both were present at a high school graduation the family attended this summer, prompting Kensley to ask repeatedly to leave. James took her to an empty football field, where, he said, she broke out in goose bumps and complained of being cold despite the sweltering heat.

Bedtime is a particular problem for the Lemons family. Kensley has been sleeping with her parents. Another child, 10-year-old Jaxson, has had bad dreams. One night, he dreamt that the shooter was coming near his dad and he tripped him, said Brandie Lemons, Jaxson’s stepmom.

Younger children like Kensley exposed to gun violence are more likely to develop post-traumatic stress disorder than older children, according to Ohio State’s Johnson-Motoyama.

Davis, of Children’s Mercy in Kansas City, said children whose brains are not fully developed can have a hard time sleeping and understanding that they are safe in their homes at night.

James got the family a new puppy — an American bulldog that already weighs 32 pounds — to help them feel protected.

“I looked up the pedigree,” he said, “They’re real protective. They’re real loving.”

Searching for an Outlet to Let Off Steam

Gabriella took up boxing after the shooting. Her mother, Bridget, said it restored some of her confidence and control that dimmed after the parade.

“I like beating people up — not in a mean way, I swear,” Gabriella said in April as she molded a mouthguard to her teeth before leaving for training.

She has since stopped boxing, however, so the money can instead go toward a trip to Puerto Rico with her Spanish class. They’re paying $153 a month for 21 months to cover the trip. Boxing classes were $60 a month.

Bridget thought boxing was a good outlet for leftover anger, but by the end of July Gabriella wasn’t sure if she still had the drive to fight back that way.

“The past is the past but we’re still gonna all, like, go through stuff. Does that make sense?” Gabriella asked.

“You’re mostly OK but you still have triggers. Is that what you mean?” her mother asked.

“Yeah,” she replied.

After the shooting, Mireya Nelson tried online classes, which didn’t work well. The first few days of summer school, Mireya had a panic attack every day in the car and her mother took her home.

Mireya wants to return to high school this fall, and Erika is wary.

“You know, if I do go back to school, there’s a chance at school of being shot, because most schools nowadays get shot up,” Erika recalled her daughter saying. “And I’m like, ‘Well, we can’t think like that. You never know what’s gonna happen.’”

This <a target="_blank" href="/mental-health/kids-children-survivors-super-bowl-shooting-panic-attacks-sleep-kansas-city/">article</a&gt; first appeared on <a target="_blank" href="">KFF Health News</a> and is republished here under a <a target="_blank" href=" Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License</a>.<img src="/wp-content/uploads/sites/8/2023/04/kffhealthnews-icon.png?w=150&quot; style="width:1em;height:1em;margin-left:10px;">

Those were reactions from some of the 20 gunshot victims from the Kansas City Chiefs Super Bowl parade shootings who were awarded $1.2 million from the #KCStrong fund on Thursday, with individuals receiving payments ranging from $22,000 to $100,000.

Chris Rosson, president and CEO of the United Way of Greater Kansas City, said the payouts will help these survivors even while recognizing that gun violence like the Feb. 14 shootings happens in Kansas City every day, typically in low-income communities that are already under-resourced.

“When launching the fund, it was important for us to support first and foremost direct victims of the violence of that day, but also to drive critical financial resources to violence prevention and response organizations, to mental health supports, into first responders,” he said.

The shootings at the end of the rally near Union Station left 24 people injured and one dead. Lisa Lopez-Galvan, 43, a mother of two and a popular Tejano DJ, was killed. 

Since the shootings, have incurred thousands of dollars in medical bills for emergency room treatment, ambulance rides, ongoing medical care for bullet wounds, or mental health counseling. Some are still struggling to return to work and are relying on a confusing patchwork of assistance from GoFundMe accounts and a group of local churches.

Erika Nelson, whose 15-year-old daughter, Mireya, was shot at the parade, said that the money from the United Way is a blessing but that her daughter still struggles with the physical and emotional wounds of the violence.

“I don’t care how much money it is. It could be a million dollars. It could be a billion dollars. It’s never going to change what my daughter goes through every day,” Nelson said.

The #KCStrong fund was launched by the United Way on Feb. 15, fueled by a first donation of $200,000 made by the Chiefs, the NFL, and the Hunt family, which owns the team. The Kauffman Foundation and an anonymous person were listed as the top donors with $250,000 each.

The funds are unrestricted, so they can be used for medical bills, college funds for the children injured during the victory celebration, or anything else families need. Rosson said the group believed the victims and the people closest to them should decide how best to spend the money.

“Giving unrestricted funding directly to those verified gunshot victims allows them to make the decisions that are right for them and their family and their path forward,” he said.

Kera Mashek, communications director of the local United Way, said the money falls under the umbrella of needs-based assistance and won’t be taxed.

United Way worked with the Jackson County, Missouri, Prosecutor’s Office to verify victims. Only 20 of the 24 victims were compensated because two did not apply and a third turned down the donation, United Way officials said. A fourth, unnamed victim was denied funds because he is connected to the criminal case, according to Jackson County Prosecutor Jean Peters Baker.

None of the victims were named in the June 27 announcement.

Emily Tavis said she felt “beyond blessed and overwhelmed with appreciation” to receive the assistance. Tavis; her partner, Jacob Gooch Sr.; and stepson, Jacob Gooch Jr., were all shot at the parade.

“It’s a huge relief that bills are going to get caught up and paid and then some,” Tavis said. She had already started paying off credit card bills with her portion of the payout.

Antonio Arellano, whose 11-year-old son, Samuel, was shot in the side, said the money was a “really big help” for the family. 

He said Samuel is hoping for a vacation to Florida and season tickets to see the Chiefs play football. But being in large crowds is still difficult for Samuel, so Arellano said they’ll try attending one game first to see how it goes.

James Lemons, who recently had the bullet lodged in his leg removed, said he appreciated the aid and feels blessed, but also feels as if the money is already gone. He wants to pay back the assistance the family received in the aftermath of the shooting, including money he borrowed to help them relocate after their landlord sold their rental home soon after the parade.

So far, have been charged in the shootings, along with three men who or lying to FBI agents. 

More than 80 people were trampled in the melee after the shootings, Baker said, adding that they are also among the many victims of the attack. They will not, however, receive money from the fund.

Campaigns like #KCStrong that emerge in the wake of mass shootings must balance distributing the money broadly enough to include people directly affected without dissipating the available resources, according to Jeff Dion of the . The nonprofit organization has helped communities across the country distribute such funds.

The OneOrlando Fund, which emerged after the Pulse nightclub shooting in 2016, for example, including $350,000 to the families of each of the 49 people killed, but also $25,000 each to 182 people who were at the nightclub but weren’t physically injured. That fund raised $29.5 million compared with the $2 million raised in Kansas City.

The $31.4 million fund that emerged in Las Vegas in 2017 after a mass shooting at a concert with 22,000 attendees to people who were not injured. As many as 1 million people attended the Super Bowl parade in February.

“When you’re dealing with actual dollars, you have to find a way to be able to serve the most people with the most amount of money,” Baker said. “So I think that was probably some of the decisions that had to be reached in this case, which is difficult, hard, but also necessary.”

The community groups, which each received $59,410, are: AdHoc Group Against Crime; Boys & Girls Clubs of Greater Kansas City; Center for Conflict Resolution; Guadalupe Centers; Kansas City Metropolitan Crime Commission; KC Common Good; KC Mothers in Charge; Lyrik’s Institution; Newhouse Domestic Violence Shelter; Rose Brooks Center; Transition Zone; The Battle Within; Uncornered; and University Health.

Other efforts have directed money to survivors of the Super Bowl parade shooting as well. GoFundMe accounts have raised $667,785. A faith-based group called “The Church Loves Kansas City” raised $184,500 and so far has spent more than $50,000 in funeral expenses, medical procedures, counseling, and living expenses, said Gary Kendall, one of the leaders.

This <a target="_blank" href="/health-care-costs/kcstrong-fund-gunshot-victims-2-million-dollars/">article</a&gt; first appeared on <a target="_blank" href="">KFF Health News</a> and is republished here under a <a target="_blank" href=" Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License</a>.<img src="/wp-content/uploads/sites/8/2023/04/kffhealthnews-icon.png?w=150&quot; style="width:1em;height:1em;margin-left:10px;">

ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø News and KCUR are following the stories of people injured during the Feb. 14 mass shooting at the Kansas City Chiefs Super Bowl celebration. Listen to how survivors navigate the financial burden that comes with being shot.

Abigail Arellano keeps her son Samuel’s medical bills in a blue folder in a cabinet above the microwave. Even now, four months after the 11-year-old was shot at the Kansas City Chiefs Super Bowl parade, the bills keep coming.

There’s one for $1,040 for the ambulance ride to the hospital that February afternoon. Another for $2,841.17 from an emergency room visit they made three days after the shooting because his bullet wound looked infected. More follow-ups and counseling in March added another $1,500.

“I think I’m missing some,” Arellano said as she leafed through the pages.

The Arellanos are uninsured and counting on assistance from the fund that raised nearly $2 million in the aftermath of the shooting that left one dead and at least 24 other people with bullet wounds. She keeps that application in the blue folder as well.

The medical costs incurred by the survivors of the shooting are hitting hard, and they won’t end soon. The average medical spending for someone who is shot in the first year, according to a Harvard Medical School study. Another study found that number goes up to $35,000 for children. Ten kids were shot at the parade.

Then there are life’s ordinary bills — rent, utilities, car repairs — that don’t stop just because someone survived a mass shooting, even if their injuries prevent them from working or sending kids to school.

The financial burden that comes with surviving is so common it has a name, according to Aswad Thomas of the nonprofit Alliance for Safety and Justice: victimization debt. Some pay it out-of-pocket. Some open a new credit card. Some find help from generous strangers. Others can’t make ends meet.

“We’re really broke right now,” said Jacob Gooch Sr., another survivor, who was shot through the foot and has not yet been able to return to work.

“We’re, like, exhausting our third credit card.”

As is common after mass shootings, a mosaic of new and established resources emerged in this Missouri city promising help. Those include the #KCStrong fund established by the United Way of Greater Kansas City, which is expected to begin paying victims at the end of June.

Survivors must navigate each opportunity to request help as best they can — and hope money comes through.

GoFundMes, Generous Strangers, and a New Line of Credit

Mostly, it’s the moms who keep the bills organized. Tucked above the microwave. Zipped inside a purse. Screenshots stored on a phone. And then there’s a maze of paperwork: The Missouri state victims’ compensation form is five pages, including instructions. It’s another six pages for help from the United Way.

Emily Tavis keeps stacks of paperwork with color-coded binder clips in her basement: black for her partner, Gooch Sr.; blue for her stepson, Jacob Gooch Jr.; pink for herself. All three were shot at the parade.

Tavis was able to walk after a bullet ripped through her leg, and she considered declining the ambulance ride because she was worried about the cost — she lacked insurance at the time.

Gooch Sr. was unable to walk because he’d been shot in the foot. So they shared an ambulance to the hospital with two of their kids.

“I’m not paying for this s—. I didn’t ask for this life,” Tavis, laughing, recalled thinking at the time. They soon realized 14-year-old Gooch Jr. had a bullet in his foot as well.

Tavis and Gooch Sr. received separate $1,145 bills for the ambulance. Gooch Jr. did not, possibly because he has health coverage through Medicaid, Tavis said.

She sends the medical bills to victims’ compensation, a program to help with the economic losses from a crime, such as medical expenses and lost wages. Even though Tavis and Gooch live in Leavenworth, Kansas, their compensation comes from the program in Missouri, where the shooting occurred.

The program pays only for economic losses not covered by like health insurance, donations, and crowdsourced fundraisers. Gooch Sr. and Jr. both had health insurance at the time of the parade, so the family has been sending only the uncovered portion to victims’ compensation.

The family initially received a lot of support. Friends and relatives made sure they had food to eat. The founder of an online group of Kansas City Chiefs fans sent $1,000 and gifts for the family. A page raised $9,500. And their tax refund helped.

They knew money might get tight with Gooch Sr. unable to work, so they paid three months’ rent in advance. They also paid to have his Ford Escape fixed so he could eventually return to work and bought Tavis a used Honda Accord so she could drive to the job she started 12 days after the parade.

And because the donations were intended for the whole family, they decided to buy summer passes to the Worlds of Fun amusement park for the kids.

But recently, they’ve felt stretched. Gooch Sr.’s short-term disability payments abruptly stopped in May when his health insurance prompted him to see an in-network doctor. He said the short-term disability plan initially didn’t approve the paperwork from his new doctor and started an investigation. The issue was resolved in June and he was expecting back pay soon. In the interim, though, the couple opened a new credit card to cover their bills.

“We’ve definitely been robbing Peter to pay Paul,” Tavis said.

Ideally, the money that eventually comes from the United Way, victims’ compensation, and, they hope, back pay from short-term disability will be enough to pay off their debts.

But, Tavis said, “You gotta do what you gotta do. We’re not going to go without lights.”

United Way Payout Expected at End of June

With every mass shooting, donations for survivors inevitably flow in, “just like peanut butter goes with jelly, because people want to help,” said Jeff Dion, executive director of the , a nonprofit that has helped many communities manage such funds.

Typically, he said, it takes about five months to disburse the money from these large community funds. Victims can potentially get money sooner if their community has a plan in place for these types of funds before a mass shooting. Funds may also advance money to people with urgent financial needs who are certain to qualify.

The United Way hung banners in the Chiefs colors on Kansas City’s Union Station with its #KCStrong campaign within days of the shootings. Driven by large donations from the team, the NFL, quarterback Patrick Mahomes, other individuals, and local companies, it ultimately raised more than $1.8 million.

The promise of a large payout has kept the injured hopeful, even as many felt confused by the process. Some people interviewed for this story did not wish to say anything negative, fearing it would hurt their allocation.

United Way officials announced in April that donations would be closed at the end of that month. On May 1, the organization saying it would issue “claimant forms” and that the Jackson County Prosecutor’s Office was helping verify shooting victims. The United Way affiliate’s board of trustees plans to meet June 26 to determine allocations, with payments arriving as early as June 27.

Kera Mashek, a spokesperson for United Way of Greater Kansas City, said payouts will be made to 20 of the 24 shooting survivors. The other four either couldn’t be verified as victims or turned down the funds, she said. Claimants do not include the 67 people prosecutors say were trampled in the melee, she said.

Pending board approval, money will also be disbursed to 14 community groups that support nonviolence initiatives, mental health concerns, and first responders, Mashek said.

To criticism that the United Way didn’t communicate well with the victims, Mashek said it tried to respond in a timely manner.

“We’ve tried to keep that line of communication open as fast as possible and most people have been very patient,” she said. “I think that they will be very grateful and very, I believe, pleasantly surprised with the amount of funding that they receive.”

Other Resources Available

Abigail Arellano hadn’t heard of victims’ compensation, which is common. A from the Alliance for Safety and Justice found that 96% of victims did not receive that support and many didn’t know it existed.

Arellano and her husband, Antonio, didn’t attend the parade but they’ve had medical expenses as well. Antonio has been going to therapy at a local health center to help with the stressful task of guiding his son through the trauma. It’s been helpful. But he’s been paying around $125 out-of-pocket for each session, he said, and the bills are mounting.

One of Samuel’s sisters set up a that raised $12,500, and Abigail said it helped that the family shared their story publicly and that Abigail reached out to help others in the Latino community affected by the shooting.

It was Abigail, for instance, who connected 71-year-old Sarai Holguin with the Mexican Consulate in Kansas City. The consulate, in turn, helped Holguin register as an official victim of the shooting, which will enable her to receive assistance from the United Way. Holguin’s bills now include a fourth surgery, to remove the bullet lodged near her knee that she had previously made peace with living with forever — until it began protruding through her skin.

‘Generous and Quick’ Relief to Victims

Several survivors were relieved and grateful to receive funds from a less high-profile, nondenominational group called “.”

The day after the shooting, Gary Kendall, who ran a Christian nonprofit called “Love KC,” started a text chain at 6 a.m. with city leaders and faith-based groups, and eventually received pledges of $184,500. (Love KC has now merged with another nonprofit, “Unite KC,” which is disbursing its funds.)

The first payout went to the family of Lisa Lopez-Galvan, the 43-year-old mother of two and popular DJ who was the sole fatality during the parade shootings. Unite KC spent $15,000 on her burial expenses.

Unite KC spent $2,800 so James and Brandie Lemons could get their health insurance restored because James couldn’t work. Unite KC also paid $2,200 for the out-of-pocket surgical costs when James decided to get the bullet removed from his leg.

“I appreciate it,” an emotional James Lemons said. “They don’t have to do that, to open their hearts for no reason.”

Erika Nelson was struggling to pay for household expenses and had to take time off from her home health care job to take her injured daughter, 15-year-old Mireya, to doctor appointments. Mireya was shot and is recovering.

A page set up by Nelson’s best friend raised about $11,000, but it was frozen after Nelson tried to get into the account and GoFundMe thought it was being hacked. She feared the lights would be shut off in their apartment, because of unpaid electric bills, and was feeling desperate.

“I’m struggling with, like, you know, groceries,” Nelson said. “People were like, ‘Oh, go to food pantries.’ Well, the food pantries are not open the times I can get off. I can’t just take off work to go to a food pantry.”

After meeting with Gary Kendall, Nelson received three months of rent and utility payments, about $3,500.

“A weight off my shoulder. I mean, yeah. In a big way,” she whispered. “’Cause you never know. You never know what can happen in two days, five days, two weeks, two months.”

Samuel Arellano’s family recently connected with Unite KC, which will pay for his ambulance bill, one of the hospital bills, and some therapy, worth about $6,000. The bill for the initial emergency room trip was about $20,000, his parents said, but the hospital had been reluctant to send it and ultimately covered the cost.

And Unite KC also intends to pay off a $1,300 credit card bill for Emily Tavis and Jacob Gooch Sr.

Unite KC has disbursed $40,000 so far and hopes to connect with more of the injured families, hoping to be as “generous and quick as we can,” Kendall said. United Way will be like a “lightning bolt” for victims’ relief, Kendall said, but his group is aiming for something different, more like a campfire that burns for the next year.

“We agree this is a horrific thing that happened. It’s a sad state of humanity but it’s a real part,” he said. “So we want to remind them that God has not forgotten you. And that although he allowed this, he has not abandoned them. We believe we can be like an extension of his love to these people.”

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ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø News and KCUR are following the stories of people injured during the shooting at the Kansas City Chiefs Super Bowl celebration in February. Listen to the stories of two people shot that day, who still have bullets lodged in their bodies. They’re grappling with physical and emotional wounds.

James Lemons, 39, wants the bullet removed from his thigh so he can go back to work.

Sarai Holguin, a 71-year-old woman originally from Mexico, has accepted the bullet lodged near her knee as her “compa” — a close friend.

Mireya Nelson, 15, was hit by a bullet that went through her jaw and broke her shoulder, where fragments remain. She’ll live with them for now, while doctors monitor lead levels in her blood for at least two years.

Nearly three months after the Kansas City Chiefs Super Bowl parade shooting left at least 24 people injured, recovery from those wounds is intensely personal and includes a surprising gray area in medicine: whether the bullets should be removed.

Medical protocol offers no clear answer. A 2016 survey of surgeons found that of respondents worked at medical facilities that had policies on bullet removal. Doctors in the U.S. often leave bullets buried deep in a person’s body, at least at first, so as not to cause further trauma.

But as gun violence has emerged as a public health epidemic, if that practice is best. Some of the wounded, like James Lemons, are left in a precarious place.

“If there’s a way to get it out, and it’s safely taken out, get it out of the person,” Lemons said. “Make that person feel more secure about themselves. And you’re not walking around with that memory in you.”

Lemons, Holguin, and Nelson are coping in very different ways.

Pain Became a Problem

Three days after the Chiefs won the Super Bowl, Lemons drove the 37 miles from Harrisonville, Missouri, to downtown Kansas City to celebrate the victory. The warehouse worker was carrying his 5-year-old daughter, Kensley, on his shoulders when he felt a bullet enter the back of his right thigh.

Gunfire erupted in the area packed with revelers, , after a “verbal confrontation” between two groups. Detectives found “multiple 9mm and .40 caliber spent shell casings” at the scene. Lemons said he understood immediately what was happening.

“I know my city. We’re not shooting off fireworks,” he said.

Lemons shielded Kensley’s face as they fell to the ground so she wouldn’t hit the concrete. His first thought was getting his family — also including his wife, Brandie; 17-year-old daughter, Kallie; and 10-year-old son, Jaxson — to safety.

“I’m hit. But don’t worry about it,” Lemons recalled telling Brandie. “We gotta go.”

He carried Kensley on his shoulders as the family walked a mile to their car. His leg bled through his pants at first then stopped, he said. It burned with pain. Brandie insisted on driving him to the hospital but traffic was at a standstill so she put on her hazard lights and drove on the wrong side of the road.

“She’s like: ‘I’m getting you to a hospital. I’m tired of people being in my way,’” Lemons recalled. “I’ve never seen my wife like that. I’m looking at her like, ‘That’s kinda sexy.’”

Lemons clapped and smiled at his wife, he said, to which she replied, “What are you smiling for? You just got shot.” He stayed in quiet admiration until they were stopped by a sheriff, who summoned an ambulance, Lemons said.

He was taken to the emergency room at University Health, which from the rally, including eight with gunshot wounds. Imaging showed the bullet barely missed an artery, Lemons said. Doctors cleansed the wound, put his leg in a brace, and told him to come back in a week. The bullet was still in his leg.

“I was a little baffled by it, but I was like, ‘OK, whatever, I’ll get out of here,’” Lemons recalled.

When he returned, doctors removed the brace but explained they often leave bullets and fragments in the body — unless they grow too painful.

“I get it, but I don’t like that,” Lemons said. “Why wouldn’t you take it out if you could?”

University Health spokesperson Leslie Carto said the hospital can’t comment on individual patient care because of federal privacy laws.

Surgeons typically do remove bullets when they encounter them during surgery or they are in dangerous locations, like in the spinal canal or risking damage to an organ, said , a pediatric surgeon at Connecticut Children’s.

Campbell also chairs the Injury Prevention and Control Committee of the American College of Surgeons’ Committee on Trauma, which works on firearm injury prevention.

, a trauma surgeon by training and the founder of the in St. Louis, said the origins of trauma care also help explain why bullets are so often left.

“Trauma care is war medicine,” Punch said. “It is set to be ready at any moment and any time, every day, to save a life. It is not equipped to take care of the healing that needs to come after.”

In the survey of surgeons, the most common reasons given for removing a bullet were pain, a palpable bullet lodged near the skin, or an infection. Far less common were lead poisoning and mental health concerns such as post-traumatic stress disorder and anxiety.

What patients wanted also affected their decisions, the surgeons said.

Lemons wanted the bullet out. The pain it caused in his leg radiated up from his thigh, making it difficult to move for more than an hour or two. Working his warehouse job was impossible.

“I gotta lift 100 pounds every night,” Lemons recalled telling his doctors. “I gotta lift my child. I can’t work like this.”

He has lost his income and his health insurance. Another stroke of bad luck: The family’s landlord sold their rental home soon after the parade, and they had to find a new place to live. This house is smaller, but it was important to keep the kids in the same school district with their friends, Lemons said in an interview in Kensley’s pink bedroom, the quietest spot to talk.

They’ve borrowed money and raised to help with the deposit and car repairs, but the parade shooting has left the family in a deep financial hole.

Without insurance, Lemons worried he couldn’t afford to have the bullet removed. Then he learned his surgery would be paid for by donations. He set up an appointment at a hospital north of the city, where a surgeon took measurements on his X-ray and explained the procedure.

“I need you to be involved as much as I’m going to be involved,” he remembered being told, “because — guess what — this ain’t my leg.”

The surgery is scheduled for this month.

‘We Became Friends’

Sarai Holguin isn’t much of a Chiefs fan, but she agreed to go to the rally at Union Station to show her friend the best spot to see the players on stage. It was an unseasonably warm day, and they were standing near an entrance where lots of police were stationed. Parents had babies in strollers, kids were playing football, and she felt safe.

A little before 2 p.m., Holguin heard what she thought were fireworks. People started running away from the stage. She turned to leave, trying to find her friend, but felt dizzy. She didn’t know she’d been shot. Three people quickly came to her aid and helped her to the ground, and a stranger took off his shirt and made a tourniquet to put on her left leg.

Holguin, a native of Puebla, Mexico, who became a U.S. citizen in 2018, had never seen so much chaos, so many paramedics working under such pressure. They were “anonymous heroes,” she said.

She saw them working on Lisa Lopez-Galvan, a well-known DJ and 43-year-old mother of two. Lopez-Galvan died at the scene, and was the sole fatality at the parade. Holguin was rushed to University Health, about five minutes from Union Station.

There doctors performed surgery, leaving the bullet in her leg. Holguin awoke to more chaos. She had lost her purse, along with her cellphone, so she couldn’t call her husband, Cesar. She had been admitted to the hospital under an alias — a common practice at medical centers to begin immediate care.

Her husband and daughter didn’t find her until about 10 p.m. — roughly eight hours after she’d been shot.

“It has been a huge trauma for me,” Holguin said through an interpreter. “I was injured and at the hospital without doing anything wrong. [The rally] was a moment to play, to relax, to be together.”

Holguin was hospitalized for a week, and two more outpatient surgeries quickly followed, mostly to remove dead tissue around the wound. She wore a wound VAC, or vacuum-assisted closure device, for several weeks and had medical appointments every other day.

Campbell, the trauma surgeon, said wound VACs are common when bullets damage tissue that isn’t easily reconstructed in surgery.

“It’s not just the physical injuries,” Campbell said. “Many times it’s the emotional, psychological injuries, which many of these patients take away as well.”

The bullet remains near Holguin’s knee.

“I’m going to have it for the rest of my life,” she said, saying she and the bullet became “compas,” close friends.

“We became friends so that she doesn’t do any bad to me anymore,” Holguin said with a smile.

Punch, of the Bullet Related Injury Clinic in St. Louis, said some people like Holguin are able to find a way to psychically live with bullets that remain.

“If you’re able to make a story around what that means for that bullet to be in your body, that gives you power; that gives you agency and choice,” Punch said.

Holguin’s life changed in an instant: She’s using a walker to get around. Her foot, she said, acts “like it had a stroke” — it dangles, and it’s difficult to move her toes.

The most frustrating consequence is that she cannot travel to see her 102-year-old father, still in Mexico. She has a live camera feed on her phone to see him, but that doesn’t offer much comfort, she said, and thinking about him brings tears.

She was told at the hospital that her medical bills would be taken care of, but then lots of them came in the mail. She tried to get victim assistance from the state of Missouri, but all the forms she had were in English, which made them difficult to comprehend. Renting the wound VAC alone cost $800 a month.

Finally she heard that the Mexican Consulate in Kansas City could help, and the consul pointed her to the Jackson County Prosecutor’s Office, with which she registered as an official victim. Now all of her bills are being paid, she said.

Holguin isn’t going to seek mental health treatment, as she believes one must learn to live with a given situation or it will become a burden.

“I have processed this new chapter in my life,” Holguin said. “I have never given up and I will move on with God’s help.”

‘I Saw Blood on My Hands’

Mireya Nelson was late to the parade. Her mother, Erika, told her she should leave early, given traffic and the million people expected to crowd into downtown Kansas City, but she and her teenage friends ignored that advice. The Nelsons live in Belton, Missouri, about a half hour south of the city.

Mireya wanted to hold the Super Bowl trophy. When she and her three friends arrived, the parade that had moved through downtown was over and the rally at Union Station had begun. They were stuck in the large crowd and quickly grew bored, Mireya said.

Getting ready to leave, Mireya and one of her friends were trying to call the driver of their group, but they couldn’t get cell service in the large crowd.

Amid the chaos of people and noise, Mireya suddenly fell.

“I saw blood on my hands. So then I knew I got shot. Yeah, and I just crawled to a tree,” Mireya said. “I actually didn’t know where I got shot at, at first. I just saw blood on my hands.”

The bullet grazed Mireya’s chin, shot through her jaw, broke her shoulder, and left through her arm. Bullet fragments remain in her shoulder. Doctors decided to leave them because Mireya had already suffered so much damage.

Mireya’s mother supports that decision, for now, noting they were just “fragments.”

“I think if it’s not going to harm her the rest of her life,” Erika said, “I don’t want her to keep going back in the hospital and getting surgery. That’s more trauma to her and more recovery time, more physical therapy and stuff like that.”

Bullet fragments, particularly ones only skin-deep, often push their way out like splinters, according to Punch, although patients aren’t always told about that. Moreover, Punch said, injuries caused by bullets extend beyond those with damaged tissue to the people around them, like Erika. He called for a holistic approach to recover from all the trauma.

“When people stay in their trauma, that trauma can change them for a lifetime,” Punch said.

Mireya will be tested for for at least the next two years. Her levels are fine now, doctors told the family, but if they get worse she will need surgery to remove the fragments, her mother said.

Campbell, the pediatric surgeon, said lead is particularly concerning for young children, whose developing brains make them especially vulnerable to . of lead — 3.5 micrograms per deciliter — is enough to report to state health officials, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Mireya talks about cute teenage boys’ being “fine” but also still wears Cookie Monster pajamas. She appears confused by the shootings, by all the attention at home, at school, from reporters. Asked how she feels about the fragments in her arm, she said, “I don’t really care for them.”

Mireya was on antibiotics for 10 days after her hospital stay because doctors feared there was bacteria in the wound. She has had physical therapy, but it’s painful to do the exercises. She has a scar on her chin. “A dent,” she said, that’s “bumpy.”

“They said she was lucky because if she wouldn’t have turned her head in a certain way, she could be gone,” Erika said.

Mireya faces a psychiatric evaluation and therapy appointments, though she doesn’t like to talk about her feelings.

So far, Erika’s insurance is paying the medical bills, though she hopes to get some help from the United Way’s , which raised nearly $1.9 million, or a faith-based organization called .

Erika doesn’t want a handout. She has a job in health care and just got a promotion.

The bullet has changed the family’s life in big ways. It is part of their conversation now. They talk about how they wish they knew what kind of ammunition it was, or what it looked like.

“Like, I wanted to keep the bullet that went through my arm,” Mireya said. “I want to know what kind of bullet it was.” That brought a sigh from her mom, who said her daughter had watched too many episodes of “Forensic Files.”

Erika beats herself up about the wound, because she couldn’t protect her daughter at the parade.

“It hits me hard because I feel bad because she begged me to get off work and I didn’t go there because when you have a new position, you can’t just take off work,” Erika said. “Because I would have took the bullet. Because I would do anything. It’s mom mode.”

This <a target="_blank" href="/public-health/the-injured-super-bowl-parade-kansas-city-bullets-still-bodies/">article</a&gt; first appeared on <a target="_blank" href="">KFF Health News</a> and is republished here under a <a target="_blank" href=" Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License</a>.<img src="/wp-content/uploads/sites/8/2023/04/kffhealthnews-icon.png?w=150&quot; style="width:1em;height:1em;margin-left:10px;">

ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø News and KCUR are following the stories of people injured during the Feb. 14 mass shooting at the Kansas City Chiefs Super Bowl celebration. Listen to how one Kansas family is coping with the trauma.

Jason Barton didn’t want to attend the Super Bowl parade this year. He told a co-worker the night before that he worried about a mass shooting. But it was Valentine’s Day, his wife is a Kansas City Chiefs superfan, and he couldn’t afford to take her to games since ticket prices soared after the team won the championship in 2020.

So Barton drove 50 miles from Osawatomie, Kansas, to downtown Kansas City, Missouri, with his wife, Bridget, her 13-year-old daughter, Gabriella, and Gabriella’s school friend. When they finally arrived home that night, they cleaned blood from Gabriella’s sneakers and found a bullet in Bridget’s backpack.

Gabriella’s legs were burned by sparks from a ricocheted bullet, Bridget was trampled while shielding Gabriella in the chaos, and Jason gave chest compressions to a man injured by gunfire. He believes it was Lyndell Mays, with second-degree felony murder.

“There’s never going to be a Valentine’s Day where I look back and I don’t think about it,” Gabriella said, “because that’s a day where we’re supposed to have fun and appreciate the people that we have.”

One month after the parade in which the that is gun violence played out on live television, the Bartons are reeling from their role at its epicenter. They were just feet from 43-year-old Lisa Lopez-Galvan, who was killed. Twenty-four other people were injured. Although the Bartons aren’t included in that official victim number, they were traumatized, physically and emotionally, and pain permeates their lives: Bridget and Jason keep canceling plans to go out, opting instead to stay home together; Gabriella plans to join a boxing club instead of the dance team.

During this first month, Kansas City community leaders have weighed how to care for people caught in the bloody crossfire and how to divide more than $2 million donated to public funds for victims in the initial outpouring of grief.

The questions are far-reaching: How does a city compensate people for medical bills, recovery treatments, counseling, and lost wages? And what about those who have PTSD-like symptoms that could last years? How does a community identify and care for victims often overlooked in the first flush of reporting on a mass shooting: the injured?

The injured list could grow. Prosecutors and Kansas City police are mounting a legal case against four of the shooting suspects, and are encouraging additional victims to come forward.

“Specifically, we’re looking for individuals who suffered wounds from their trying to escape. A stampede occurred while people were trying to flee,” said Jackson County Prosecutor Jean Peters Baker. Anyone who “in the fleeing of this event that maybe fell down, you were trampled, you sprained an ankle, you broke a bone.”

Meanwhile, people who took charge of raising money and providing services to care for the injured are wrestling with who gets the money — and who doesn’t. Due to large donations from celebrities like Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce, some victims or their families will have access to hundreds of thousands of dollars for medical expenses. Other victims may simply have their counseling covered.

The overall economic cost of U.S. firearm injuries is estimated by a recent at $557 billion annually. Most of that — 88% — represented quality-of-life losses among those injured by firearms and their families. The JAMA-published study found that each nonfatal firearm injury leads to roughly $30,000 in direct health care spending per survivor in the first year alone.

In the immediate aftermath of the shootings, as well-intentioned GoFundMe pages popped up to help victims, executives at United Way of Greater Kansas City gathered to devise a collective donation response. They came up with “three concentric circles of victims,” said Jessica Blubaugh, the United Way’s chief philanthropy officer, and launched the .

“There were folks that were obviously directly impacted by gunfire. Then the next circle out is folks that were impacted, not necessarily by gunshots, but by physical impact. So maybe they were trampled and maybe they tore a ligament or something because they were running away,” Blubaugh said. “Then third is folks that were just adjacent and/or bystanders that have a lot of trauma from all of this.”

PTSD, Panic, and the Echo of Gunfire

Bridget Barton returned to Kansas City the day after the shooting to turn in the bullet she found in her backpack and to give a statement at police headquarters. Unbeknownst to her, Mayor Quinton Lucas and the police and fire chiefs had just finished a press conference outside the building. She was mobbed by the media assembled there — interviews that are now a blur.

“I don’t know how you guys do this every day,” she remembered telling a detective once she finally got inside.

The Bartons have been overwhelmed by well wishes from close friends and family as they navigate the trauma, almost to the point of exhaustion. Bridget took to social media to explain she wasn’t ignoring the messages, she’s just responding as she feels able — some days she can hardly look at her phone, she said.

A family friend bought new Barbie blankets for Gabriella and her friend after the ones they brought to the parade were lost or ruined. Bridget tried replacing the blankets herself at her local Walmart, but when she was bumped accidentally, it triggered a panic attack. She abandoned her cart and drove home.

“I’m trying to get my anxiety under control,” Bridget said.

That means therapy. Before the parade, she was already seeing a therapist and planning to begin eye movement desensitization and reprocessing, a form of therapy associated with treating post-traumatic stress disorder. Now the shooting is the first thing she wants to talk about in therapy.

Since Gabriella, an eighth grader, has returned to middle school, she has dealt with the compounding immaturity of adolescence: peers telling her to get over it, pointing finger guns at her, or even saying it should have been her who was shot. But her friends are checking on her and asking how she’s doing. She wishes more people would do the same for her friend, who took off running when the shooting started and avoided injury. Gabriella feels guilty about bringing her to what turned into a horrifying experience.

“We can tell her all day long, ‘It wasn’t your fault. She’s not your responsibility.’ Just like I can tell myself, ‘It wasn’t my fault or my responsibility,’” Bridget said. “But I still bawled on her mom’s shoulder telling her how sorry I was that I grabbed my kid first.”

The two girls have spent a lot of time talking since the shooting, which Gabriella said helps with her own stress. So does spending time with her dog and her lizard, putting on makeup, and listening to music — Tech N9ne’s performance was a highlight of the Super Bowl celebration for her.

In addition to the spark burns on Gabriella’s legs, when she fell to the concrete in the pandemonium she split open a burn wound on her stomach previously caused by a styling iron.

“When I see that, I just picture my mom trying to protect me and seeing everyone run,” Gabriella said of the wound.

It’s hard not to feel forgotten by the public, Bridget said. The shooting, especially its survivors, have largely faded from the headlines aside from court dates. shootings have occurred in the area since the parade. Doesn’t the community care, she wonders, that her family is still living with the fallout every day?

“I’m going to put this as plainly as possible. I’m f—ing pissed because my family went through something traumatic,” Bridget vented in a recent social media post. “I don’t really want anything other [than], ‘Your story matters, too, and we want to know how you’re doing.’ Have we gotten that? Abso-f—lutely not.”

‘What Is the Landscape of Need?’

Helped in part by celebrities like Swift and Kelce, donations for the family of Lopez-Galvan, the lone fatality, and other victims poured in immediately after the shootings. Swift and Kelce donated $100,000 each. With the help of an initial $200,000 donation from the Kansas City Chiefs, the United Way’s took off, reaching $1 million in the first two weeks and sitting at $1.2 million now.

Six were established. One solely for the Lopez-Galvan family has collected over $406,000. Smaller ones were started by a local college student and Swift fans. Churches have also stepped up, and one local coalition had raised $183,000, money set aside for Lopez-Galvan’s funeral, counseling services for five victims, and other medical bills from Children’s Mercy Kansas City hospital, said Ray Jarrett, executive director of .

Meanwhile, those leading the efforts found models in other cities. The United Way’s Blubaugh called counterparts who’d responded to their own mass shootings in Orlando, Florida; Buffalo, New York; and Newtown, Connecticut.

“The unfortunate reality is we have a cadre of communities across the country who have already faced tragedies like this,” Blubaugh said. “So there is an unfortunate protocol that is, sort of, already in place.”

#KCStrong monies could start being paid out by the end of March, Blubaugh said. Hundreds of people called the nonprofit’s 211 line, and the United Way is consulting with hospitals and law enforcement to verify victims and then offer services they may need, she said.

The range of needs is staggering — several people are still recovering at home, some are seeking counseling, and many weren’t even counted in the beginning. For instance, a plainclothes police officer was injured in the melee but is doing fine now, said Police Chief Stacey Graves.

Determining who is eligible for assistance was one of the first conversations United Way officials had when creating the fund. They prioritized three areas of focus: first were the wounded victims and their families, second was collaborating with organizations already helping victims in violence intervention and prevention and mental health services, and third were the first responders.

Specifically, the funds will be steered to cover medical bills, or lost wages for those who haven’t been able to work since the shootings, Blubaugh said. The goal is to work quickly to help people, she said, but also to spend the money in a judicious, strategic way.

“We don’t have a clear sightline of the entire landscape that we’re dealing with,” Blubaugh said. “Not only of how much money do we have to work with, but also, what is the landscape of need? And we need both of those things to be able to make those decisions.”

Firsthand Experience of Daily Kansas City Violence

Jason used his lone remaining sick day to stay home with Bridget and Gabriella. An overnight automation technician, he is the family’s primary breadwinner.

“I can’t take off work, you know?” he said. “It happened. It sucked. But it’s time to move on.”

“He’s a guy’s guy,” Bridget interjected.

On Jason’s first night back at work, the sudden sound of falling dishes startled Bridget and Gabriella, sending them into each other’s arms crying.

“It’s just those moments of flashbacks that are kicking our butts,” Bridget said.

In a way, the shooting has brought the family closer. They’ve been through a lot recently. Jason survived a heart attack and cancer last year. Raising a teenager is never easy.

Bridget can appreciate that the bullet lodged in her backpack, narrowly missing her, and that Gabriella’s legs were burned by sparks but she wasn’t shot.

Jason is grateful for another reason: It wasn’t a terrorist attack, as he initially feared. Instead, it fits into the type of gun violence he’d become accustomed to growing up in Kansas City, which recorded last year, although he’d never been this close to it before.

“This crap happens every single day,” he said. “The only difference is we were here for it.”

This <a target="_blank" href="/public-health/super-bowl-parade-shooting-gun-violence-kansas-city-survivors/">article</a&gt; first appeared on <a target="_blank" href="">KFF Health News</a> and is republished here under a <a target="_blank" href=" Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License</a>.<img src="/wp-content/uploads/sites/8/2023/04/kffhealthnews-icon.png?w=150&quot; style="width:1em;height:1em;margin-left:10px;">

ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø News and KCUR followed the stories of people injured during the Feb. 14, 2024, mass shooting at the Kansas City Chiefs Super Bowl celebration. As the one-year mark since the parade shooting nears, the last installment in our series “The Injured” looks at how some survivors talk about resilience, while others are desperately trying to hang on.

Emily Tavis was on a first date in December when she looked up and realized they were driving past the downtown Kansas City, Missouri, intersection where a bullet ripped through her leg at last year’s Super Bowl victory parade.

“Oh f—,” Tavis said, bewildering her date.

She lives 35 miles away in Leavenworth, Kansas, and hadn’t yet returned to Union Station, where the mass shooting happened. She felt like crying. Or maybe it was a panic attack. She held up a finger signaling to her date that she needed a moment. That’s when it hit him, too.

“Oh crap, I didn’t even realize,” he said, and kept driving in silence.

Tavis sucked in her tears until the station was out of view.

“So anyway,” she said aloud, while thinking to herself, “way to go. Panic attack, first date.”

A year after the Feb. 14 shooting that killed one and injured at least 24 people, the survivors and their families are still reeling. Relationships have strained. Parents are anxious about their children. The generous financial support and well wishes that poured through in early days have now dried up. And they’re ambivalent about the team they all root for; as the Chiefs moved on to another Super Bowl, many wondered why their beloved team hasn’t acknowledged what they have all been going through.

“I can’t believe the Chiefs didn’t do anything for us,” said Jacob Gooch Sr., who was shot in the foot. The team, the owner family’s foundation, and the National Football League gave a combined $200,000 to a fund for survivors, but Gooch said no one from the organization reached out to his family, three members of whom were shot.

What’s happening to these families is far from unusual. Many survivors emotionally freeze as a coping mechanism to avoid fully feeling the trauma they suffered. But with time, survivors experience what therapists call “thawing,” and the intensity of what happened can suddenly overpower them like it did Tavis.

“Trauma pulls us into the past,” said , a therapist who published a based on his work with witnesses of the 9/11 attacks in New York.

Sights, smells, sounds, tastes, and touches can all trigger flashbacks that shut down the brain like an overloaded circuit breaker. It’s a survival response, Behrman said; the brain is a friend.

The key to recovery is to help survivors find healthy ways to manage those triggers — when they are ready.

Survivors thaw at their own pace. Regaining control after a life-threatening event is a process that can take weeks, months, or years.

It can be hard not to feel forgotten when life carries on around them. As fans rallied around the Chiefs this season, survivors found it hard to watch the games. The Chiefs lost to the Philadelphia Eagles in Sunday’s Super Bowl. Philadelphia will hold its own parade on Friday, exactly one year after the shooting.

“It sucks because everybody else went on,” Jason Barton said. He performed CPR on a man he now thinks was one of the alleged shooters, his wife found a bullet slug in her backpack, and his stepdaughter was burned by sparks from a ricocheted bullet.

“If we were on the other side of that place, we would too,” he said. “It wouldn’t have affected us.”

A Trip Back to Union Station

Tavis isn’t the only survivor to have found herself unintentionally back at Union Station in the year since the shooting. Kids had field trips to Science City, located inside the station. Follow-up doctor visits were often on nearby Hospital Hill. An October dinner organized for survivors by a local faith-based group was less than a mile away, prompting one young survivor to decline the invitation.

Tavis had planned to return to Union Station as part of her healing process. She thought she would go on the one-year mark to have a moment alone to feel whatever emotions swept over her there.

Maybe God was showing her she was ready by placing her back there unexpectedly, her therapist told her. Maybe. But she didn’t feel ready in that moment.

Tavis wanted to see a therapist right after the shooting. But she didn’t seek one out until July, after the local United Way distributed financial assistance to survivors and relieved the months-long financial strain of lost work and medical bills incurred by many. Tavis and her partner at the time had taken out an extra credit card to cover expenses while they waited for the promised help.

After two months of visits, her therapist started prepping Tavis for eye movement desensitization and reprocessing, a technique to help trauma survivors. She now spends every other session making her way through a spreadsheet of memories from the parade, visualizing and reprocessing them one by one.

She’s nervous as the one-year mark approaches. It’s on Valentine’s Day, and she worries it’ll be depressing.

She decided to invite Gooch, her former partner, to come to Union Station with her that day. Despite everything, he’s the one who understands. They were at the parade together with their son and Jacob’s two older kids. Both Gooch Sr. and his older son, Jacob Gooch Jr., were also shot.

Trauma Changes Who We Are

Gooch Sr. hasn’t worked since the parade. His job required standing for 10-hour shifts four days a week, but he couldn’t walk for months after a bullet shattered a bone in his foot and it slowly fused back together. He hoped to go back to work in July. But his foot didn’t heal correctly and he had surgery in August, followed by weeks of recovery.

His short-term disability ran out, as did his health insurance through work. His employer held his job for a while before releasing him in August. He’s applied for other jobs in and around Leavenworth: production, staffing agencies, auto repair. Nothing’s come through.

“We’ve all gone through problems, not just me,” Gooch Sr. said. “I got shot in my foot and haven’t worked for a year. There are people that have been through much worse stuff over the past year.”

He feels good walking now and can run short distances without pain. But he doesn’t know if he’ll ever play football again, a mainstay of his life since he can remember. He played safety for the semiprofessional and, before the parade, the 38-year-old was considering making the 2024 season his last as a player.

“A lot more than football has been stolen from me in this last year. Like my whole life has been stolen from me,” Gooch Sr. said. “I really hate that part of it.”

And those emotions are painfully real. Trauma threatens our beliefs about ourselves, said Behrman, the therapist. Every person brings their own history to a traumatic event, a different identity that risks being shattered. The healing work that comes later often involves letting go and building something new.

Recently Gooch Sr. started going to a , led by the husband of someone he sang with in a children’s choir growing up. At a Sunday service this month, the pastor spoke about finding a path when you’re lost.

“I’m looking for the path. I’m in the grass right now,” Gooch Sr. said at his home later that evening.

“I’m obviously on a path, but I don’t know where I’m headed.”

‘I Did the Best I Could’

Every day before Jason Barton goes to work, he asks his wife, Bridget, if he should stay home with her.

She’s said yes enough that he’s out of paid time off. Jason, who’s survived cancer and a heart attack, had to take unpaid leave in January when a bad case of the flu put him in the hospital. That’s real love, Bridget said with tearful eyes, sitting with Jason and her 14-year-old daughter, Gabriella, in their home in Osawatomie, Kansas.

Bridget has connected with the mother of another girl injured in the shooting. They’ve exchanged texts and voicemails throughout the year. It’s nice to have someone to talk to who gets it, Bridget said. They’re hoping to get the girls together to build a connection as well.

Except for a trip to therapy once a week, Bridget doesn’t leave the house much anymore. It can feel like a prison, she said, but she’s too scared to leave. “It’s my own internal hell,” she said. She keeps thinking about that bullet slug that lodged in her backpack. What if she’d been standing differently? What if they’d left 10 seconds earlier? Would things be different?

A Post-it note in her kitchen reminds her: “I’m safe. Gabriella is safe. I did the best I could.”

She carries a lot of guilt. About Jason staying home. About not leaving the house, even to see her grandkids. About wanting the family to go to the parade in the first place. At the same time, she knows she kind of thrived in the chaos after the shooting, taking charge of her daughter, talking to the police. It’s confusing.

The family has carried the trauma differently. In the six months after the parade, Jason watched reality TV shows that kept him out of his head — 23 seasons of “Deadliest Catch” and 21 seasons of “Gold Rush,” including spinoffs, he estimated. Lately he’s kept his mind occupied with a new hobby: building model cars and planes. He just finished a black 1968 Shelby Mustang, and next is an F4U-4 Corsair plane that Bridget got him.

Gabriella was unfazed about returning to Union Station for a class field trip to Science City, but she was startled when she saw a group of police officers inside the station. Her mom watched her location on her phone and texted her all day.

Gabriella took up boxing after the parade, then switched to wrestling. It had been going well, even felt empowering. But she’s stopped going, and Bridget thinks it’s partly due to the emotion of the anniversary — the first is always the hardest, her therapist said. Gabriella insisted that wrestling was just exhausting her.

Because they weren’t shot, the family didn’t benefit from resources available to other survivors. They understand that other families are recovering from bullet wounds or even mourning a death.

Still, it would be nice to have some acknowledgment of their emotional trauma. Their names have been in the news. You’d think the Chiefs would have at least sent a letter saying, “We’re sorry this happened to you,” Jason said.

Jason proposed to Bridget at a Chiefs game. Now watching games on TV triggers flashbacks.

“I want to be a part of Chiefs Kingdom again,” Bridget said, “but I just can’t. And that is a huge, really lonely feeling.”

‘There Is a Word Called “Resilience”’

One evening last October, survivors gathered with their families at a Mexican restaurant in downtown Kansas City.

Some came dressed in their Sunday best, some in red football jerseys. All ages, toddlers to 70-somethings, some from Missouri, some from Kansas. Some spoke only Spanish, some only English. Most of the two dozen people had never met before. But as they talked, they discovered the shooting that binds them also gave them a common language.

Two young boys realized they’d tossed a football during the jubilation before the violence erupted. A woman in her early 70s named Sarai Holguin remembered watching them play on that warm February day. After a blessing and dinner, Holguin, who was shot in the knee and has had four surgeries, stood to address the room.

“I was the first victim taken to the medical tent,” she said in Spanish, her words translated by a relative of another survivor. She saw everything, she explained, as, one by one, more survivors were brought to the tent for treatment, including Lisa Lopez-Galvan, a 43-year-old mother who was killed that day.

Yet in that tragedy, Holguin saw the beauty of people helping one another.

“This showed us that humanity is still alive, that love is still alive. There is a word called ‘resilience,’” Holguin said, the translator stumbling to understand the last word, as people in the audience caught it and shouted it out. “Resilience.”

“This word helps us overcome the problems we face,” Holguin said. “To try to put the tragic moment we all lived behind us and move on, we must remember the beautiful moments.”

This <a target="_blank" href="/health-care-costs/the-injured-kansas-city-chiefs-parade-shooting-survivors-one-year-anniversary-trauma/">article</a&gt; first appeared on <a target="_blank" href="">KFF Health News</a> and is republished here under a <a target="_blank" href=" Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License</a>.<img src="/wp-content/uploads/sites/8/2023/04/kffhealthnews-icon.png?w=150&quot; style="width:1em;height:1em;margin-left:10px;">

ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø News and KCUR are following the stories of people injured during the Feb. 14 mass shooting at the Kansas City Chiefs Super Bowl celebration. Listen to how survivors are seeking a sense of safety.

KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Twenty-four minutes before the mass shooting at the Kansas City Chiefs Super Bowl victory parade in February left one person dead and at least 24 people injured, Jenipher Cabrera felt a bullet pierce the back of her right thigh.

The 20-year-old and her family were just four blocks from Union Station, in a river of red-shirted Chiefs fans walking toward the massive rally after the parade that warm Valentine’s Day. The bullet — fired by teen boys fighting in the street — thrust Cabrera forward.

She grabbed her mom by the shoulder and signaled in panic to her bleeding leg with her large brown eyes, not saying a word. Cabrera was being treated in an ambulance when she heard reports blasting from the police radio.

“My mom was trying to get on the ambulance,” Cabrera said. “I remember them saying, like, ‘You can’t get on. There might be other victims that we need to pick up.’”

Cabrera’s shooting happened before the one that garnered the big headlines that day and is one of hundreds that kill or injure Kansas City-area residents each year. That endless drumbeat of gun violence — from one-off incidents to mass shootings — has shattered the sense of safety for those who survive. As victims and their families try to move forward, reminders of gun violence are inescapable in the media, in their communities, in their daily lives.

“I look at people differently,” said James Lemons, who was shot in the thigh at the rally. Now when he’s around strangers he can’t help but wonder if they have a gun and if his kids are safe.

The new NFL season opened here for Lisa Lopez-Galvan, the only person killed at the parade. Kansas City has recorded at least this year. Local police say there have been an additional 527 “bullet-to-skin victims” — people who were shot and survived. And there were nationwide by mid-September.

Collectively it is all taking a toll.

Survivors suffer panic attacks and feel a heightened sense of danger in crowds and deep anxieties about the threat of violence anywhere in Kansas City.

Every shooting survivor responds in their own way to gun violence and even the threat of it, according to LJ Punch, a trauma surgeon by training and founder of the Bullet Related Injury Clinic in St. Louis.

For some, getting shot ensures they will always be on guard, perhaps even armed. Others want nothing to do with guns ever again.

“But what’s the common ground? That people desperately want to be safe,” Punch said.

Cabrera’s search to make meaning out of what happened has led her to work with a frustrated local lawmaker seeking new gun laws — something akin to impossible given Missouri state law, which on firearms.

Learning of Other Shootings on the Phone

Feb. 14 is a movie in Cabrera’s mind, in slow motion, frame by frame, and the soundtrack is her voice, talking and talking. She sees a group of rowdy teenage boys running around her and her family. Then two pops — fireworks? Another pop. Finally, a fourth.

“I think that’s where the shock kicked in, and I grabbed my mom,” Cabrera remembered. “I didn’t say anything to her. I just, like, looked at her, and I had, like, my eyes were widened, and I kind of signaled with my eyes to look down at my leg.”

Cabrera fell and other fans rushed to her rescue, calling 911, and began cutting off her leggings. Four men instantly pulled off their belts when asked for a tourniquet. She remembers thinking that if she lost consciousness, she could die. So she talked and talked. Or so she thought.

One of her rescuers later said she actually didn’t say a word even when he asked how many fingers he was holding up.

“He told me [that] my eyes were huge, like oranges, and that all I was basically doing was, like, looking up and down four times since he had four fingers up,” Cabrera said.

Cabrera remembers being moved out of the emergency room at University Health to make room for from the shooting at the rally, including eight with gunshot wounds. She checked social media on her phone — another shooting? Unreal. Finally her parents found her. She spent seven days in the hospital.

Cabrera is grateful to be alive. But she is triggered now when she sees groups of teenage boys cursing and playing, or when she sees red Chiefs shirts. Hearing four pops in a row — a regular occurrence in her northeast Kansas City neighborhood — makes Cabrera’s chest swell and she braces for a panic attack.

“It runs over and over and over and over in my mind,” she said.

‘An Increasing Sense of Threat?’

The U.S. surgeon general declared gun violence a public health crisis in June, but nearly any new regulation on guns is a political nonstarter in Missouri. In fact, a 2021 state law — signed at where one of the weapons used in the parade shooting was purchased — would have barred local police from enforcing federal gun laws. The law was by a federal appeals court in August.

Missouri has no age restrictions on gun use and possession, although federal law largely prohibits juveniles from carrying handguns.

Polling of Missouri voters for requiring background checks and instituting age restrictions for gun purchases, but also nearly half were counties and cities to pass their own gun rules.

Per capita, Kansas City, Missouri, is among the more violent places in the nation. From 2014 to 2023, there were in this city of 510,000, leaving 1,275 people dead and 1,624 injured. And while in more than 100 cities across the country last year, Kansas City recorded its .

Punch, of the Bullet Related Injury Clinic, likened the violence to a disease outbreak that goes unaddressed and spreads. The state’s permissive posture toward guns might supercharge the reality in Kansas City, Punch said, but it didn’t start it.

“So is there something going on? Is there an increasing sense of threat?” Punch asked.

Jason Barton was familiar with that violence growing up in Kansas City. Now settled in Osawatomie, Kansas, he thought long and hard about bringing his own gun for protection when he drove his family to the Super Bowl parade.

Ultimately he decided against it, surmising that if something happened and he pulled out a gun, he would be arrested or shot.

Barton responded quickly to the shooting, which happened right in front of him and his family. His wife found a bullet in her backpack. His stepdaughter’s legs were burned by sparks from a bullet ricochet.

Despite his worst fears coming true, Barton said not bringing his gun that day was the right decision.

“Guns don’t need to be brought into places like that,” he said.

‘A 12-Gauge With Teeth’

Mass shootings can derail survivors’ sense of safety, according to Heather Martin, a survivor of the Columbine High School shooting in 1999 and co-founder of , which provides peer support to survivors of mass trauma.

“Trying to find a way to feel safe again is very common,” Martin said, “in the years following it.”

James Lemons had always felt trepidation about returning to Kansas City, where he grew up. He even brought his gun with him to the parade but left it in the car at the urging of his wife. His 5-year-old daughter was on his shoulders when a bullet entered the back of his thigh. He shielded her from the ground as he fell. What was he realistically going to do with a gun?

And yet he can’t help but wonder “what if.” He can’t shake the feeling that he failed to protect his family. Waking up from dreams about the parade, “I just start crying,” he said. He knows he hasn’t processed it yet but he doesn’t know how to start. He has focused on his family’s safety.

They got two American bulldogs this summer, making three total in the house now — one for each kid. Lemons described them as “like having a gun without having a gun.”

“I’ve got a 12-gauge with teeth,” Lemons joked, “just a big, softy protector.”

Most nights he sleeps only a few hours at a time before waking up to check on the kids. Usually he’s on the couch. It’s more comfortable for his leg that is still healing, and it helps him avoid the restless kicks of his 5-year-old, who has slept with her parents since the parade.

It also ensures he’ll be the one to intercept an intruder who breaks into the house.

Emily Tavis, who was shot through the leg, found solace at her church and from a sister congregation’s in-house therapist.

But then, the Sunday morning after the Donald Trump rally shooting in July, the preacher’s sermon turned to gun violence — triggering panic inside her.

“And it just, like, overwhelmed me so much, where I just went to the bathroom,” Tavis said, “and I just stayed in the bathroom for the rest of the sermon.” Now even attending church gives her pause.

Tavis recently moved into a new house in Leavenworth, Kansas, that she is renting from a friend. The friend’s husband cautioned that if Tavis was going to be alone she needed a gun for protection. She told him she just can’t deal with guns right now.

“And he’s like, ‘OK, well, take this.’ And he pulls out this giant machete,” Tavis recalled, laughing.

“So I have a machete now.”

A Search for Something Good

Cabrera, the young woman who couldn’t speak after being shot, is now trying to use her voice in the fight against gun violence.

Manny Abarca, a Jackson County, Missouri, legislator, lives down the street. One evening, he came to visit. Cabrera’s parents did most of the talking; she’s shy by nature. But then he turned and asked her directly: What did she want?

“I just want, like, some justice for my case,” she said, “or something good to happen.”

Before the parade, Cabrera was offered a factory job where her sister worked, but she hadn’t started because her leg was still healing. So Abarca offered her an internship, helping him establish a Jackson County Office of Gun Violence Prevention, a plan he introduced in July in response to the parade shootings.

Abarca was in the Chiefs victory parade with his 5-year-old daughter, Camila. They were in Union Station when shots were fired — and they huddled in a downstairs bathroom.

“I just said, ‘Hey, you know, just be calm. Just be quiet. Let’s just find out what’s going on. Something’s happened,’” Abarca said. “And then she said, ‘This is a drill.’ And hey, it tore everything out of me, because I was like, she’s referring to her training” at school.

They emerged shaken but safe, only to learn that Lopez-Galvan had died. Abarca knew the 43-year-old mother and popular Tejano DJ through the area’s tight-knit Hispanic community.

Abarca has taken advantage of this heated time after the Super Bowl parade shootings to work on anti-violence measures, despite knowing the severe limitations posed by state law.

In June, the Jackson County Legislature passed a measure that gives local teeth to a federal domestic violence law that allows judges to remove firearms from offenders.

While Abarca was able to get a gun violence office approved, county officials vetoed another measure that would establish age limits for purchasing or possessing firearms, fearing a lawsuit from a combative state attorney general. He hired Cabrera, he said, because she is bilingual and he wants her help as a survivor.

In a sense, the work makes Cabrera feel stronger in her fight to move forward from the shooting. Still, her family’s perception of safety has been shattered, and no one will be attending games or a possible Super Bowl victory parade anytime soon.

“We just never expected something like that to happen,” she said. “And so I think we’re gonna be more cautious now and maybe just watch it through TV.”

[Update: This article was revised at 5 p.m. ET on Nov. 14, 2024, to reflect news developments.]

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ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø News and KCUR are following the stories of people injured during the Feb. 14 mass shooting at the Kansas City Chiefs Super Bowl celebration. Listen to how children wounded that day are dealing with their injuries or emotional scars.

Six months after Gabriella Magers-Darger’s legs were burned by sparks from a ricocheted bullet at the Kansas City Chiefs Super Bowl parade in February, the 14-year-old is ready to leave the past behind.

She is dreading the pitfalls of being a high school freshman, even as she looks forward to being back with friends and at color guard, dance, and volleyball. She might even join the wrestling team to get some respect at school.

But the past remains ever present.

At a July Fourth gathering, a family friend brought noise-canceling headphones in case the fireworks became too much. Earlier in the summer Gabriella had a hard time viewing a relative’s gun collection, the handguns in particular. And she hyperventilated when she saw a family friend’s finger after it was sliced by accident — the sight of blood reminds her of seeing a fatally wounded Lisa Lopez-Galvan minutes after she was shot outside Union Station, the only person killed that day.

Her mom, Bridget Barton, said Gabriella has had a chip on her shoulder since the parade.

“She’s lost some softness to her, some gentleness to her,” Barton said.

Children are particularly vulnerable to the stresses of gun violence, and 10 of 24 people injured by bullets at the Feb. 14 parade were under 18 years old. Countless more children like Gabriella experienced the trauma firsthand. They’ve endured fear, anger, sleep problems, and hypersensitivity to crowds and noises.

A 15-year-old girl who was shot through the jaw and shoulder effectively dropped out of school for a time and daily panic attacks kept her from summer school, too. An 11-year-old boy shot in the side described feeling angry at school for reasons he couldn’t explain. A 5-year-old girl who was on her father’s shoulders when he was hit by gunfire panics each time her dad feels sick, fearing he has been shot again.

“She’s not the same kid. I mean, she’s definitely not,” said Erika Nelson, mother of the 15-year-old, Mireya, who has scars on her jaw and face. “You never know when she’s going to snap. You never know. You might say something or someone might bring up something that reminds her of that day.”

Guns overtook motor vehicle accidents as the leading cause of death for children in 2020, but a far higher number of kids are hit by gunfire and survive. that kids sustain nonfatal firearm injuries anywhere fromtwo to four times more often than they are killed by guns.

Scientists say the long-term effects of gun violence on kids are little researched and poorly understood. But the harm is pervasive. Harvard and Massachusetts General Hospital that during the first year after a firearm injury, child survivors experienced a 117% increase in pain disorders, a 68% increase in psychiatric disorders, and a 144% increase in substance use disorders. The mental health effects spill over — to mothers, fathers, siblings.

For many affected by the shooting in Kansas City, Missouri, the triggers began right away.

‘I Get Mad Easily’

Just 10 days after Samuel Arellano was shot at the parade, he attended another big sporting event.

Samuel was invited to attend a University of Kansas men’s basketball game at Allen Fieldhouse in Lawrence. During a break in the game, with a and his parents, former KU star Jalen Wilson appeared on the scoreboard and addressed him directly.

“I heard about your story,” Wilson, who now plays in the NBA, said on the big screen. “I’m so very thankful that you are here today and it is a blessing that we can have you to give you the love and support you truly deserve.”

Wilson asked the 16,000 fans in attendance to stand and give Samuel a round of applause. As the crowd clapped and an announcer bellowed about him being a “brave young man,” Samuel looked at his parents, then down at his feet, smiling shyly.

But minutes later when the game resumed, Samuel started to cry and had to leave the auditorium with his mom, Abigail.

“When it got pretty loud, that’s when he started breaking up again,” his dad, Antonio, said. “So she had to step out with him for a minute. So any loud places, if it’s too loud, it’s affecting him.”

Samuel, who turned 11 in March, was shot in the ribs on his right side. The scar on his back is barely noticeable now, but lingering effects from the parade shooting are obvious. He is seeing a therapist — as is his father, though Abigail has had a tough time finding a Spanish-speaking one and still hasn’t had an appointment.

Samuel had trouble sleeping in the first weeks after the shooting and often crawled in bed with his mom and dad. He used to get good grades, but that became more difficult, Abigail said. His personality has changed, which sometimes has shown up at school.

“I get mad easily,” Samuel said. “I [have] never been like this before but like, if they tell me to sit down, I get mad. I don’t know why.”

Traumatized children often have difficulty expressing emotions and may be given to outbursts of anger, according to , a professor of social work at Ohio State University.

“I’m sure for that child there is a sense of tremendous injustice about what happened,” Johnson-Motoyama said.

Especially right after the shooting, Samuel had panic attacks, Antonio said, and he’d break out in a sweat. Therapists told them that was normal. But the parents also kept him off his phone for a while, as there was so much about the shooting on the news and online.

Abigail, who works at a car dealership with Antonio, is anxious about seeing her son change, his suffering and sadness. She is also concerned for her three daughters, a 16-year-old and 13-year-old twins. Her father, Victor Salas, who was with Samuel at the parade, was also reeling in its aftermath.

“I’m crying and crying and crying about what happened,” Salas said in Spanish four days after the parade. “Because it was chaos. It doesn’t mean that families don’t love their family, but everyone took off to save their own lives. I saved my grandchildren’s lives, but what happens to the rest of the people? We’re not prepared.”

On the good side, Samuel felt very supported by the community in Kansas City, Kansas. Many people from his school stopped by in the first few days to visit, including friends and even a former bus driver, who was in tears. He has a “room full of candy,” Abigail said, mostly Skittles, his favorite.

An autographed football from Kansas City Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes arrived on his birthday. It made him cry, his father said, which happens pretty often.

“There are good and bad days, days that are more normal and easier, and then there are days where the family has to be a little bit more aware and supportive,” Abigail said in Spanish. “He’s always been outgoing and talkative like his mom, but that has changed since the parade.”

Fourth of July a Weeklong Trigger

The Fourth of July was particularly harrowing for many of the young survivors and their families. Should they buy fireworks? Will they want to celebrate? And why do all the firecrackers going off in the neighborhood sound like gunshots?

Fourteen-year-old Gabriella needed help from her stepfather, Jason Barton, to light her fireworks this year, something she is ordinarily enthusiastic about doing herself. At the parade, like many people, the Barton family initially mistook the sound of gunfire for fireworks.

And Erika Nelson, a single mom in Belton, Missouri, feared even bringing up the holiday with Mireya, who has always loved Independence Day. Eventually Mireya said she didn’t want any big fireworks this year and wanted only her mom to set theirs off.

“Just any little trigger — I mean, it could be a light crackle — and she just clenched,” Erika Nelson said.

Patty Davis, a program manager for trauma-informed care at Children’s Mercy hospital in Kansas City, said even her clients who were at the parade but were not injured still flinch at the sounds of sirens or other loud noises. It’s a powerful response to gun violence, she said.

“So not just an accidental trauma,” she said, “but a trauma that was perpetrated for violent purposes, which can cause an increased level of anxiety for persons around that to wonder if it’s going to happen again. And how safe are they?”

Reliving Getting Shot

Random sounds, bright lights, and crowds can catch the kids and their parents off guard. In June, Mireya Nelson was waiting for her older sister after a dance recital, hoping to see a boy she knew give a flower to a girl everyone said he had a crush on. Her mom wanted to go, but Mireya shushed her.

“Then all of a sudden, there was a loud boom,” Erika said. “She dropped low to the ground. And then she jumped back up. She goes, ‘Oh my God, I was getting shot again!’”

Mireya said it so loudly people were staring, so it was Erika’s turn to shush her and try to soothe her.

“I was like, ‘Mireya, it’s OK. You’re all right. They dropped a table. They’re just moving stuff out. It was an accident,’” Erika said.

It took a few minutes for the shock to wear off and Mireya later giggled about it, but Erika is always on watch.

Her daughter’s early sadness — she watched movies for hours, crying throughout — has since changed to a cheekiness. Half a year later, Mireya will joke about the shooting, which tears her mother up. But maybe that is part of the healing process, Erika says.

Before the Fourth of July, Mireya went to Worlds of Fun, a large amusement park, and had a good time. She felt OK because there were security guards everywhere. She also enjoyed a visit to the local FBI office with a friend who was with her the day of the shooting. But when someone suggested a trip to the ballet, Mireya squashed it quickly — it’s near Union Station, the site of the shooting. She doesn’t want to go downtown anymore.

Erika said the doctor appointments and financial strains have been a lot to juggle and that her biggest frustration as a parent is that she’s not able to fix things for her daughter.

“They have to go their own way, their own process of healing. I can’t shake her, like, ‘Get back to yourself,’” Erika said. “It could take months, years. Who knows? It could be the rest of her life. But I hope that she can overcome a little bit of it.”

Goose Bumps in the Sweltering Heat

James Lemons noticed a change in his 5-year-old daughter, Kensley, who was on his shoulders when he was shot at the parade. Before the shooting Kensley was outgoing and engaged, James said, but now she is withdrawn, like she has closed off her bubble and disconnected from people.

Large crowds and police officers remind Kensley of the parade. Both were present at a high school graduation the family attended this summer, prompting Kensley to ask repeatedly to leave. James took her to an empty football field, where, he said, she broke out in goose bumps and complained of being cold despite the sweltering heat.

Bedtime is a particular problem for the Lemons family. Kensley has been sleeping with her parents. Another child, 10-year-old Jaxson, has had bad dreams. One night, he dreamt that the shooter was coming near his dad and he tripped him, said Brandie Lemons, Jaxson’s stepmom.

Younger children like Kensley exposed to gun violence are more likely to develop post-traumatic stress disorder than older children, according to Ohio State’s Johnson-Motoyama.

Davis, of Children’s Mercy in Kansas City, said children whose brains are not fully developed can have a hard time sleeping and understanding that they are safe in their homes at night.

James got the family a new puppy — an American bulldog that already weighs 32 pounds — to help them feel protected.

“I looked up the pedigree,” he said, “They’re real protective. They’re real loving.”

Searching for an Outlet to Let Off Steam

Gabriella took up boxing after the shooting. Her mother, Bridget, said it restored some of her confidence and control that dimmed after the parade.

“I like beating people up — not in a mean way, I swear,” Gabriella said in April as she molded a mouthguard to her teeth before leaving for training.

She has since stopped boxing, however, so the money can instead go toward a trip to Puerto Rico with her Spanish class. They’re paying $153 a month for 21 months to cover the trip. Boxing classes were $60 a month.

Bridget thought boxing was a good outlet for leftover anger, but by the end of July Gabriella wasn’t sure if she still had the drive to fight back that way.

“The past is the past but we’re still gonna all, like, go through stuff. Does that make sense?” Gabriella asked.

“You’re mostly OK but you still have triggers. Is that what you mean?” her mother asked.

“Yeah,” she replied.

After the shooting, Mireya Nelson tried online classes, which didn’t work well. The first few days of summer school, Mireya had a panic attack every day in the car and her mother took her home.

Mireya wants to return to high school this fall, and Erika is wary.

“You know, if I do go back to school, there’s a chance at school of being shot, because most schools nowadays get shot up,” Erika recalled her daughter saying. “And I’m like, ‘Well, we can’t think like that. You never know what’s gonna happen.’”

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Those were reactions from some of the 20 gunshot victims from the Kansas City Chiefs Super Bowl parade shootings who were awarded $1.2 million from the #KCStrong fund on Thursday, with individuals receiving payments ranging from $22,000 to $100,000.

Chris Rosson, president and CEO of the United Way of Greater Kansas City, said the payouts will help these survivors even while recognizing that gun violence like the Feb. 14 shootings happens in Kansas City every day, typically in low-income communities that are already under-resourced.

“When launching the fund, it was important for us to support first and foremost direct victims of the violence of that day, but also to drive critical financial resources to violence prevention and response organizations, to mental health supports, into first responders,” he said.

The shootings at the end of the rally near Union Station left 24 people injured and one dead. Lisa Lopez-Galvan, 43, a mother of two and a popular Tejano DJ, was killed. 

Since the shootings, have incurred thousands of dollars in medical bills for emergency room treatment, ambulance rides, ongoing medical care for bullet wounds, or mental health counseling. Some are still struggling to return to work and are relying on a confusing patchwork of assistance from GoFundMe accounts and a group of local churches.

Erika Nelson, whose 15-year-old daughter, Mireya, was shot at the parade, said that the money from the United Way is a blessing but that her daughter still struggles with the physical and emotional wounds of the violence.

“I don’t care how much money it is. It could be a million dollars. It could be a billion dollars. It’s never going to change what my daughter goes through every day,” Nelson said.

The #KCStrong fund was launched by the United Way on Feb. 15, fueled by a first donation of $200,000 made by the Chiefs, the NFL, and the Hunt family, which owns the team. The Kauffman Foundation and an anonymous person were listed as the top donors with $250,000 each.

The funds are unrestricted, so they can be used for medical bills, college funds for the children injured during the victory celebration, or anything else families need. Rosson said the group believed the victims and the people closest to them should decide how best to spend the money.

“Giving unrestricted funding directly to those verified gunshot victims allows them to make the decisions that are right for them and their family and their path forward,” he said.

Kera Mashek, communications director of the local United Way, said the money falls under the umbrella of needs-based assistance and won’t be taxed.

United Way worked with the Jackson County, Missouri, Prosecutor’s Office to verify victims. Only 20 of the 24 victims were compensated because two did not apply and a third turned down the donation, United Way officials said. A fourth, unnamed victim was denied funds because he is connected to the criminal case, according to Jackson County Prosecutor Jean Peters Baker.

None of the victims were named in the June 27 announcement.

Emily Tavis said she felt “beyond blessed and overwhelmed with appreciation” to receive the assistance. Tavis; her partner, Jacob Gooch Sr.; and stepson, Jacob Gooch Jr., were all shot at the parade.

“It’s a huge relief that bills are going to get caught up and paid and then some,” Tavis said. She had already started paying off credit card bills with her portion of the payout.

Antonio Arellano, whose 11-year-old son, Samuel, was shot in the side, said the money was a “really big help” for the family. 

He said Samuel is hoping for a vacation to Florida and season tickets to see the Chiefs play football. But being in large crowds is still difficult for Samuel, so Arellano said they’ll try attending one game first to see how it goes.

James Lemons, who recently had the bullet lodged in his leg removed, said he appreciated the aid and feels blessed, but also feels as if the money is already gone. He wants to pay back the assistance the family received in the aftermath of the shooting, including money he borrowed to help them relocate after their landlord sold their rental home soon after the parade.

So far, have been charged in the shootings, along with three men who or lying to FBI agents. 

More than 80 people were trampled in the melee after the shootings, Baker said, adding that they are also among the many victims of the attack. They will not, however, receive money from the fund.

Campaigns like #KCStrong that emerge in the wake of mass shootings must balance distributing the money broadly enough to include people directly affected without dissipating the available resources, according to Jeff Dion of the . The nonprofit organization has helped communities across the country distribute such funds.

The OneOrlando Fund, which emerged after the Pulse nightclub shooting in 2016, for example, including $350,000 to the families of each of the 49 people killed, but also $25,000 each to 182 people who were at the nightclub but weren’t physically injured. That fund raised $29.5 million compared with the $2 million raised in Kansas City.

The $31.4 million fund that emerged in Las Vegas in 2017 after a mass shooting at a concert with 22,000 attendees to people who were not injured. As many as 1 million people attended the Super Bowl parade in February.

“When you’re dealing with actual dollars, you have to find a way to be able to serve the most people with the most amount of money,” Baker said. “So I think that was probably some of the decisions that had to be reached in this case, which is difficult, hard, but also necessary.”

The community groups, which each received $59,410, are: AdHoc Group Against Crime; Boys & Girls Clubs of Greater Kansas City; Center for Conflict Resolution; Guadalupe Centers; Kansas City Metropolitan Crime Commission; KC Common Good; KC Mothers in Charge; Lyrik’s Institution; Newhouse Domestic Violence Shelter; Rose Brooks Center; Transition Zone; The Battle Within; Uncornered; and University Health.

Other efforts have directed money to survivors of the Super Bowl parade shooting as well. GoFundMe accounts have raised $667,785. A faith-based group called “The Church Loves Kansas City” raised $184,500 and so far has spent more than $50,000 in funeral expenses, medical procedures, counseling, and living expenses, said Gary Kendall, one of the leaders.

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ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø News and KCUR are following the stories of people injured during the Feb. 14 mass shooting at the Kansas City Chiefs Super Bowl celebration. Listen to how survivors navigate the financial burden that comes with being shot.

Abigail Arellano keeps her son Samuel’s medical bills in a blue folder in a cabinet above the microwave. Even now, four months after the 11-year-old was shot at the Kansas City Chiefs Super Bowl parade, the bills keep coming.

There’s one for $1,040 for the ambulance ride to the hospital that February afternoon. Another for $2,841.17 from an emergency room visit they made three days after the shooting because his bullet wound looked infected. More follow-ups and counseling in March added another $1,500.

“I think I’m missing some,” Arellano said as she leafed through the pages.

The Arellanos are uninsured and counting on assistance from the fund that raised nearly $2 million in the aftermath of the shooting that left one dead and at least 24 other people with bullet wounds. She keeps that application in the blue folder as well.

The medical costs incurred by the survivors of the shooting are hitting hard, and they won’t end soon. The average medical spending for someone who is shot in the first year, according to a Harvard Medical School study. Another study found that number goes up to $35,000 for children. Ten kids were shot at the parade.

Then there are life’s ordinary bills — rent, utilities, car repairs — that don’t stop just because someone survived a mass shooting, even if their injuries prevent them from working or sending kids to school.

The financial burden that comes with surviving is so common it has a name, according to Aswad Thomas of the nonprofit Alliance for Safety and Justice: victimization debt. Some pay it out-of-pocket. Some open a new credit card. Some find help from generous strangers. Others can’t make ends meet.

“We’re really broke right now,” said Jacob Gooch Sr., another survivor, who was shot through the foot and has not yet been able to return to work.

“We’re, like, exhausting our third credit card.”

As is common after mass shootings, a mosaic of new and established resources emerged in this Missouri city promising help. Those include the #KCStrong fund established by the United Way of Greater Kansas City, which is expected to begin paying victims at the end of June.

Survivors must navigate each opportunity to request help as best they can — and hope money comes through.

GoFundMes, Generous Strangers, and a New Line of Credit

Mostly, it’s the moms who keep the bills organized. Tucked above the microwave. Zipped inside a purse. Screenshots stored on a phone. And then there’s a maze of paperwork: The Missouri state victims’ compensation form is five pages, including instructions. It’s another six pages for help from the United Way.

Emily Tavis keeps stacks of paperwork with color-coded binder clips in her basement: black for her partner, Gooch Sr.; blue for her stepson, Jacob Gooch Jr.; pink for herself. All three were shot at the parade.

Tavis was able to walk after a bullet ripped through her leg, and she considered declining the ambulance ride because she was worried about the cost — she lacked insurance at the time.

Gooch Sr. was unable to walk because he’d been shot in the foot. So they shared an ambulance to the hospital with two of their kids.

“I’m not paying for this s—. I didn’t ask for this life,” Tavis, laughing, recalled thinking at the time. They soon realized 14-year-old Gooch Jr. had a bullet in his foot as well.

Tavis and Gooch Sr. received separate $1,145 bills for the ambulance. Gooch Jr. did not, possibly because he has health coverage through Medicaid, Tavis said.

She sends the medical bills to victims’ compensation, a program to help with the economic losses from a crime, such as medical expenses and lost wages. Even though Tavis and Gooch live in Leavenworth, Kansas, their compensation comes from the program in Missouri, where the shooting occurred.

The program pays only for economic losses not covered by like health insurance, donations, and crowdsourced fundraisers. Gooch Sr. and Jr. both had health insurance at the time of the parade, so the family has been sending only the uncovered portion to victims’ compensation.

The family initially received a lot of support. Friends and relatives made sure they had food to eat. The founder of an online group of Kansas City Chiefs fans sent $1,000 and gifts for the family. A page raised $9,500. And their tax refund helped.

They knew money might get tight with Gooch Sr. unable to work, so they paid three months’ rent in advance. They also paid to have his Ford Escape fixed so he could eventually return to work and bought Tavis a used Honda Accord so she could drive to the job she started 12 days after the parade.

And because the donations were intended for the whole family, they decided to buy summer passes to the Worlds of Fun amusement park for the kids.

But recently, they’ve felt stretched. Gooch Sr.’s short-term disability payments abruptly stopped in May when his health insurance prompted him to see an in-network doctor. He said the short-term disability plan initially didn’t approve the paperwork from his new doctor and started an investigation. The issue was resolved in June and he was expecting back pay soon. In the interim, though, the couple opened a new credit card to cover their bills.

“We’ve definitely been robbing Peter to pay Paul,” Tavis said.

Ideally, the money that eventually comes from the United Way, victims’ compensation, and, they hope, back pay from short-term disability will be enough to pay off their debts.

But, Tavis said, “You gotta do what you gotta do. We’re not going to go without lights.”

United Way Payout Expected at End of June

With every mass shooting, donations for survivors inevitably flow in, “just like peanut butter goes with jelly, because people want to help,” said Jeff Dion, executive director of the , a nonprofit that has helped many communities manage such funds.

Typically, he said, it takes about five months to disburse the money from these large community funds. Victims can potentially get money sooner if their community has a plan in place for these types of funds before a mass shooting. Funds may also advance money to people with urgent financial needs who are certain to qualify.

The United Way hung banners in the Chiefs colors on Kansas City’s Union Station with its #KCStrong campaign within days of the shootings. Driven by large donations from the team, the NFL, quarterback Patrick Mahomes, other individuals, and local companies, it ultimately raised more than $1.8 million.

The promise of a large payout has kept the injured hopeful, even as many felt confused by the process. Some people interviewed for this story did not wish to say anything negative, fearing it would hurt their allocation.

United Way officials announced in April that donations would be closed at the end of that month. On May 1, the organization saying it would issue “claimant forms” and that the Jackson County Prosecutor’s Office was helping verify shooting victims. The United Way affiliate’s board of trustees plans to meet June 26 to determine allocations, with payments arriving as early as June 27.

Kera Mashek, a spokesperson for United Way of Greater Kansas City, said payouts will be made to 20 of the 24 shooting survivors. The other four either couldn’t be verified as victims or turned down the funds, she said. Claimants do not include the 67 people prosecutors say were trampled in the melee, she said.

Pending board approval, money will also be disbursed to 14 community groups that support nonviolence initiatives, mental health concerns, and first responders, Mashek said.

To criticism that the United Way didn’t communicate well with the victims, Mashek said it tried to respond in a timely manner.

“We’ve tried to keep that line of communication open as fast as possible and most people have been very patient,” she said. “I think that they will be very grateful and very, I believe, pleasantly surprised with the amount of funding that they receive.”

Other Resources Available

Abigail Arellano hadn’t heard of victims’ compensation, which is common. A from the Alliance for Safety and Justice found that 96% of victims did not receive that support and many didn’t know it existed.

Arellano and her husband, Antonio, didn’t attend the parade but they’ve had medical expenses as well. Antonio has been going to therapy at a local health center to help with the stressful task of guiding his son through the trauma. It’s been helpful. But he’s been paying around $125 out-of-pocket for each session, he said, and the bills are mounting.

One of Samuel’s sisters set up a that raised $12,500, and Abigail said it helped that the family shared their story publicly and that Abigail reached out to help others in the Latino community affected by the shooting.

It was Abigail, for instance, who connected 71-year-old Sarai Holguin with the Mexican Consulate in Kansas City. The consulate, in turn, helped Holguin register as an official victim of the shooting, which will enable her to receive assistance from the United Way. Holguin’s bills now include a fourth surgery, to remove the bullet lodged near her knee that she had previously made peace with living with forever — until it began protruding through her skin.

‘Generous and Quick’ Relief to Victims

Several survivors were relieved and grateful to receive funds from a less high-profile, nondenominational group called “.”

The day after the shooting, Gary Kendall, who ran a Christian nonprofit called “Love KC,” started a text chain at 6 a.m. with city leaders and faith-based groups, and eventually received pledges of $184,500. (Love KC has now merged with another nonprofit, “Unite KC,” which is disbursing its funds.)

The first payout went to the family of Lisa Lopez-Galvan, the 43-year-old mother of two and popular DJ who was the sole fatality during the parade shootings. Unite KC spent $15,000 on her burial expenses.

Unite KC spent $2,800 so James and Brandie Lemons could get their health insurance restored because James couldn’t work. Unite KC also paid $2,200 for the out-of-pocket surgical costs when James decided to get the bullet removed from his leg.

“I appreciate it,” an emotional James Lemons said. “They don’t have to do that, to open their hearts for no reason.”

Erika Nelson was struggling to pay for household expenses and had to take time off from her home health care job to take her injured daughter, 15-year-old Mireya, to doctor appointments. Mireya was shot and is recovering.

A page set up by Nelson’s best friend raised about $11,000, but it was frozen after Nelson tried to get into the account and GoFundMe thought it was being hacked. She feared the lights would be shut off in their apartment, because of unpaid electric bills, and was feeling desperate.

“I’m struggling with, like, you know, groceries,” Nelson said. “People were like, ‘Oh, go to food pantries.’ Well, the food pantries are not open the times I can get off. I can’t just take off work to go to a food pantry.”

After meeting with Gary Kendall, Nelson received three months of rent and utility payments, about $3,500.

“A weight off my shoulder. I mean, yeah. In a big way,” she whispered. “’Cause you never know. You never know what can happen in two days, five days, two weeks, two months.”

Samuel Arellano’s family recently connected with Unite KC, which will pay for his ambulance bill, one of the hospital bills, and some therapy, worth about $6,000. The bill for the initial emergency room trip was about $20,000, his parents said, but the hospital had been reluctant to send it and ultimately covered the cost.

And Unite KC also intends to pay off a $1,300 credit card bill for Emily Tavis and Jacob Gooch Sr.

Unite KC has disbursed $40,000 so far and hopes to connect with more of the injured families, hoping to be as “generous and quick as we can,” Kendall said. United Way will be like a “lightning bolt” for victims’ relief, Kendall said, but his group is aiming for something different, more like a campfire that burns for the next year.

“We agree this is a horrific thing that happened. It’s a sad state of humanity but it’s a real part,” he said. “So we want to remind them that God has not forgotten you. And that although he allowed this, he has not abandoned them. We believe we can be like an extension of his love to these people.”

This <a target="_blank" href="/health-care-costs/super-bowl-parade-shooting-survivors-donations-bills-wait-kansas-city/">article</a&gt; first appeared on <a target="_blank" href="">KFF Health News</a> and is republished here under a <a target="_blank" href=" Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License</a>.<img src="/wp-content/uploads/sites/8/2023/04/kffhealthnews-icon.png?w=150&quot; style="width:1em;height:1em;margin-left:10px;">

ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø News and KCUR are following the stories of people injured during the shooting at the Kansas City Chiefs Super Bowl celebration in February. Listen to the stories of two people shot that day, who still have bullets lodged in their bodies. They’re grappling with physical and emotional wounds.

James Lemons, 39, wants the bullet removed from his thigh so he can go back to work.

Sarai Holguin, a 71-year-old woman originally from Mexico, has accepted the bullet lodged near her knee as her “compa” — a close friend.

Mireya Nelson, 15, was hit by a bullet that went through her jaw and broke her shoulder, where fragments remain. She’ll live with them for now, while doctors monitor lead levels in her blood for at least two years.

Nearly three months after the Kansas City Chiefs Super Bowl parade shooting left at least 24 people injured, recovery from those wounds is intensely personal and includes a surprising gray area in medicine: whether the bullets should be removed.

Medical protocol offers no clear answer. A 2016 survey of surgeons found that of respondents worked at medical facilities that had policies on bullet removal. Doctors in the U.S. often leave bullets buried deep in a person’s body, at least at first, so as not to cause further trauma.

But as gun violence has emerged as a public health epidemic, if that practice is best. Some of the wounded, like James Lemons, are left in a precarious place.

“If there’s a way to get it out, and it’s safely taken out, get it out of the person,” Lemons said. “Make that person feel more secure about themselves. And you’re not walking around with that memory in you.”

Lemons, Holguin, and Nelson are coping in very different ways.

Pain Became a Problem

Three days after the Chiefs won the Super Bowl, Lemons drove the 37 miles from Harrisonville, Missouri, to downtown Kansas City to celebrate the victory. The warehouse worker was carrying his 5-year-old daughter, Kensley, on his shoulders when he felt a bullet enter the back of his right thigh.

Gunfire erupted in the area packed with revelers, , after a “verbal confrontation” between two groups. Detectives found “multiple 9mm and .40 caliber spent shell casings” at the scene. Lemons said he understood immediately what was happening.

“I know my city. We’re not shooting off fireworks,” he said.

Lemons shielded Kensley’s face as they fell to the ground so she wouldn’t hit the concrete. His first thought was getting his family — also including his wife, Brandie; 17-year-old daughter, Kallie; and 10-year-old son, Jaxson — to safety.

“I’m hit. But don’t worry about it,” Lemons recalled telling Brandie. “We gotta go.”

He carried Kensley on his shoulders as the family walked a mile to their car. His leg bled through his pants at first then stopped, he said. It burned with pain. Brandie insisted on driving him to the hospital but traffic was at a standstill so she put on her hazard lights and drove on the wrong side of the road.

“She’s like: ‘I’m getting you to a hospital. I’m tired of people being in my way,’” Lemons recalled. “I’ve never seen my wife like that. I’m looking at her like, ‘That’s kinda sexy.’”

Lemons clapped and smiled at his wife, he said, to which she replied, “What are you smiling for? You just got shot.” He stayed in quiet admiration until they were stopped by a sheriff, who summoned an ambulance, Lemons said.

He was taken to the emergency room at University Health, which from the rally, including eight with gunshot wounds. Imaging showed the bullet barely missed an artery, Lemons said. Doctors cleansed the wound, put his leg in a brace, and told him to come back in a week. The bullet was still in his leg.

“I was a little baffled by it, but I was like, ‘OK, whatever, I’ll get out of here,’” Lemons recalled.

When he returned, doctors removed the brace but explained they often leave bullets and fragments in the body — unless they grow too painful.

“I get it, but I don’t like that,” Lemons said. “Why wouldn’t you take it out if you could?”

University Health spokesperson Leslie Carto said the hospital can’t comment on individual patient care because of federal privacy laws.

Surgeons typically do remove bullets when they encounter them during surgery or they are in dangerous locations, like in the spinal canal or risking damage to an organ, said , a pediatric surgeon at Connecticut Children’s.

Campbell also chairs the Injury Prevention and Control Committee of the American College of Surgeons’ Committee on Trauma, which works on firearm injury prevention.

, a trauma surgeon by training and the founder of the in St. Louis, said the origins of trauma care also help explain why bullets are so often left.

“Trauma care is war medicine,” Punch said. “It is set to be ready at any moment and any time, every day, to save a life. It is not equipped to take care of the healing that needs to come after.”

In the survey of surgeons, the most common reasons given for removing a bullet were pain, a palpable bullet lodged near the skin, or an infection. Far less common were lead poisoning and mental health concerns such as post-traumatic stress disorder and anxiety.

What patients wanted also affected their decisions, the surgeons said.

Lemons wanted the bullet out. The pain it caused in his leg radiated up from his thigh, making it difficult to move for more than an hour or two. Working his warehouse job was impossible.

“I gotta lift 100 pounds every night,” Lemons recalled telling his doctors. “I gotta lift my child. I can’t work like this.”

He has lost his income and his health insurance. Another stroke of bad luck: The family’s landlord sold their rental home soon after the parade, and they had to find a new place to live. This house is smaller, but it was important to keep the kids in the same school district with their friends, Lemons said in an interview in Kensley’s pink bedroom, the quietest spot to talk.

They’ve borrowed money and raised to help with the deposit and car repairs, but the parade shooting has left the family in a deep financial hole.

Without insurance, Lemons worried he couldn’t afford to have the bullet removed. Then he learned his surgery would be paid for by donations. He set up an appointment at a hospital north of the city, where a surgeon took measurements on his X-ray and explained the procedure.

“I need you to be involved as much as I’m going to be involved,” he remembered being told, “because — guess what — this ain’t my leg.”

The surgery is scheduled for this month.

‘We Became Friends’

Sarai Holguin isn’t much of a Chiefs fan, but she agreed to go to the rally at Union Station to show her friend the best spot to see the players on stage. It was an unseasonably warm day, and they were standing near an entrance where lots of police were stationed. Parents had babies in strollers, kids were playing football, and she felt safe.

A little before 2 p.m., Holguin heard what she thought were fireworks. People started running away from the stage. She turned to leave, trying to find her friend, but felt dizzy. She didn’t know she’d been shot. Three people quickly came to her aid and helped her to the ground, and a stranger took off his shirt and made a tourniquet to put on her left leg.

Holguin, a native of Puebla, Mexico, who became a U.S. citizen in 2018, had never seen so much chaos, so many paramedics working under such pressure. They were “anonymous heroes,” she said.

She saw them working on Lisa Lopez-Galvan, a well-known DJ and 43-year-old mother of two. Lopez-Galvan died at the scene, and was the sole fatality at the parade. Holguin was rushed to University Health, about five minutes from Union Station.

There doctors performed surgery, leaving the bullet in her leg. Holguin awoke to more chaos. She had lost her purse, along with her cellphone, so she couldn’t call her husband, Cesar. She had been admitted to the hospital under an alias — a common practice at medical centers to begin immediate care.

Her husband and daughter didn’t find her until about 10 p.m. — roughly eight hours after she’d been shot.

“It has been a huge trauma for me,” Holguin said through an interpreter. “I was injured and at the hospital without doing anything wrong. [The rally] was a moment to play, to relax, to be together.”

Holguin was hospitalized for a week, and two more outpatient surgeries quickly followed, mostly to remove dead tissue around the wound. She wore a wound VAC, or vacuum-assisted closure device, for several weeks and had medical appointments every other day.

Campbell, the trauma surgeon, said wound VACs are common when bullets damage tissue that isn’t easily reconstructed in surgery.

“It’s not just the physical injuries,” Campbell said. “Many times it’s the emotional, psychological injuries, which many of these patients take away as well.”

The bullet remains near Holguin’s knee.

“I’m going to have it for the rest of my life,” she said, saying she and the bullet became “compas,” close friends.

“We became friends so that she doesn’t do any bad to me anymore,” Holguin said with a smile.

Punch, of the Bullet Related Injury Clinic in St. Louis, said some people like Holguin are able to find a way to psychically live with bullets that remain.

“If you’re able to make a story around what that means for that bullet to be in your body, that gives you power; that gives you agency and choice,” Punch said.

Holguin’s life changed in an instant: She’s using a walker to get around. Her foot, she said, acts “like it had a stroke” — it dangles, and it’s difficult to move her toes.

The most frustrating consequence is that she cannot travel to see her 102-year-old father, still in Mexico. She has a live camera feed on her phone to see him, but that doesn’t offer much comfort, she said, and thinking about him brings tears.

She was told at the hospital that her medical bills would be taken care of, but then lots of them came in the mail. She tried to get victim assistance from the state of Missouri, but all the forms she had were in English, which made them difficult to comprehend. Renting the wound VAC alone cost $800 a month.

Finally she heard that the Mexican Consulate in Kansas City could help, and the consul pointed her to the Jackson County Prosecutor’s Office, with which she registered as an official victim. Now all of her bills are being paid, she said.

Holguin isn’t going to seek mental health treatment, as she believes one must learn to live with a given situation or it will become a burden.

“I have processed this new chapter in my life,” Holguin said. “I have never given up and I will move on with God’s help.”

‘I Saw Blood on My Hands’

Mireya Nelson was late to the parade. Her mother, Erika, told her she should leave early, given traffic and the million people expected to crowd into downtown Kansas City, but she and her teenage friends ignored that advice. The Nelsons live in Belton, Missouri, about a half hour south of the city.

Mireya wanted to hold the Super Bowl trophy. When she and her three friends arrived, the parade that had moved through downtown was over and the rally at Union Station had begun. They were stuck in the large crowd and quickly grew bored, Mireya said.

Getting ready to leave, Mireya and one of her friends were trying to call the driver of their group, but they couldn’t get cell service in the large crowd.

Amid the chaos of people and noise, Mireya suddenly fell.

“I saw blood on my hands. So then I knew I got shot. Yeah, and I just crawled to a tree,” Mireya said. “I actually didn’t know where I got shot at, at first. I just saw blood on my hands.”

The bullet grazed Mireya’s chin, shot through her jaw, broke her shoulder, and left through her arm. Bullet fragments remain in her shoulder. Doctors decided to leave them because Mireya had already suffered so much damage.

Mireya’s mother supports that decision, for now, noting they were just “fragments.”

“I think if it’s not going to harm her the rest of her life,” Erika said, “I don’t want her to keep going back in the hospital and getting surgery. That’s more trauma to her and more recovery time, more physical therapy and stuff like that.”

Bullet fragments, particularly ones only skin-deep, often push their way out like splinters, according to Punch, although patients aren’t always told about that. Moreover, Punch said, injuries caused by bullets extend beyond those with damaged tissue to the people around them, like Erika. He called for a holistic approach to recover from all the trauma.

“When people stay in their trauma, that trauma can change them for a lifetime,” Punch said.

Mireya will be tested for for at least the next two years. Her levels are fine now, doctors told the family, but if they get worse she will need surgery to remove the fragments, her mother said.

Campbell, the pediatric surgeon, said lead is particularly concerning for young children, whose developing brains make them especially vulnerable to . of lead — 3.5 micrograms per deciliter — is enough to report to state health officials, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Mireya talks about cute teenage boys’ being “fine” but also still wears Cookie Monster pajamas. She appears confused by the shootings, by all the attention at home, at school, from reporters. Asked how she feels about the fragments in her arm, she said, “I don’t really care for them.”

Mireya was on antibiotics for 10 days after her hospital stay because doctors feared there was bacteria in the wound. She has had physical therapy, but it’s painful to do the exercises. She has a scar on her chin. “A dent,” she said, that’s “bumpy.”

“They said she was lucky because if she wouldn’t have turned her head in a certain way, she could be gone,” Erika said.

Mireya faces a psychiatric evaluation and therapy appointments, though she doesn’t like to talk about her feelings.

So far, Erika’s insurance is paying the medical bills, though she hopes to get some help from the United Way’s , which raised nearly $1.9 million, or a faith-based organization called .

Erika doesn’t want a handout. She has a job in health care and just got a promotion.

The bullet has changed the family’s life in big ways. It is part of their conversation now. They talk about how they wish they knew what kind of ammunition it was, or what it looked like.

“Like, I wanted to keep the bullet that went through my arm,” Mireya said. “I want to know what kind of bullet it was.” That brought a sigh from her mom, who said her daughter had watched too many episodes of “Forensic Files.”

Erika beats herself up about the wound, because she couldn’t protect her daughter at the parade.

“It hits me hard because I feel bad because she begged me to get off work and I didn’t go there because when you have a new position, you can’t just take off work,” Erika said. “Because I would have took the bullet. Because I would do anything. It’s mom mode.”

This <a target="_blank" href="/public-health/the-injured-super-bowl-parade-kansas-city-bullets-still-bodies/">article</a&gt; first appeared on <a target="_blank" href="">KFF Health News</a> and is republished here under a <a target="_blank" href=" Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License</a>.<img src="/wp-content/uploads/sites/8/2023/04/kffhealthnews-icon.png?w=150&quot; style="width:1em;height:1em;margin-left:10px;">

ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø News and KCUR are following the stories of people injured during the Feb. 14 mass shooting at the Kansas City Chiefs Super Bowl celebration. Listen to how one Kansas family is coping with the trauma.

Jason Barton didn’t want to attend the Super Bowl parade this year. He told a co-worker the night before that he worried about a mass shooting. But it was Valentine’s Day, his wife is a Kansas City Chiefs superfan, and he couldn’t afford to take her to games since ticket prices soared after the team won the championship in 2020.

So Barton drove 50 miles from Osawatomie, Kansas, to downtown Kansas City, Missouri, with his wife, Bridget, her 13-year-old daughter, Gabriella, and Gabriella’s school friend. When they finally arrived home that night, they cleaned blood from Gabriella’s sneakers and found a bullet in Bridget’s backpack.

Gabriella’s legs were burned by sparks from a ricocheted bullet, Bridget was trampled while shielding Gabriella in the chaos, and Jason gave chest compressions to a man injured by gunfire. He believes it was Lyndell Mays, with second-degree felony murder.

“There’s never going to be a Valentine’s Day where I look back and I don’t think about it,” Gabriella said, “because that’s a day where we’re supposed to have fun and appreciate the people that we have.”

One month after the parade in which the that is gun violence played out on live television, the Bartons are reeling from their role at its epicenter. They were just feet from 43-year-old Lisa Lopez-Galvan, who was killed. Twenty-four other people were injured. Although the Bartons aren’t included in that official victim number, they were traumatized, physically and emotionally, and pain permeates their lives: Bridget and Jason keep canceling plans to go out, opting instead to stay home together; Gabriella plans to join a boxing club instead of the dance team.

During this first month, Kansas City community leaders have weighed how to care for people caught in the bloody crossfire and how to divide more than $2 million donated to public funds for victims in the initial outpouring of grief.

The questions are far-reaching: How does a city compensate people for medical bills, recovery treatments, counseling, and lost wages? And what about those who have PTSD-like symptoms that could last years? How does a community identify and care for victims often overlooked in the first flush of reporting on a mass shooting: the injured?

The injured list could grow. Prosecutors and Kansas City police are mounting a legal case against four of the shooting suspects, and are encouraging additional victims to come forward.

“Specifically, we’re looking for individuals who suffered wounds from their trying to escape. A stampede occurred while people were trying to flee,” said Jackson County Prosecutor Jean Peters Baker. Anyone who “in the fleeing of this event that maybe fell down, you were trampled, you sprained an ankle, you broke a bone.”

Meanwhile, people who took charge of raising money and providing services to care for the injured are wrestling with who gets the money — and who doesn’t. Due to large donations from celebrities like Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce, some victims or their families will have access to hundreds of thousands of dollars for medical expenses. Other victims may simply have their counseling covered.

The overall economic cost of U.S. firearm injuries is estimated by a recent at $557 billion annually. Most of that — 88% — represented quality-of-life losses among those injured by firearms and their families. The JAMA-published study found that each nonfatal firearm injury leads to roughly $30,000 in direct health care spending per survivor in the first year alone.

In the immediate aftermath of the shootings, as well-intentioned GoFundMe pages popped up to help victims, executives at United Way of Greater Kansas City gathered to devise a collective donation response. They came up with “three concentric circles of victims,” said Jessica Blubaugh, the United Way’s chief philanthropy officer, and launched the .

“There were folks that were obviously directly impacted by gunfire. Then the next circle out is folks that were impacted, not necessarily by gunshots, but by physical impact. So maybe they were trampled and maybe they tore a ligament or something because they were running away,” Blubaugh said. “Then third is folks that were just adjacent and/or bystanders that have a lot of trauma from all of this.”

PTSD, Panic, and the Echo of Gunfire

Bridget Barton returned to Kansas City the day after the shooting to turn in the bullet she found in her backpack and to give a statement at police headquarters. Unbeknownst to her, Mayor Quinton Lucas and the police and fire chiefs had just finished a press conference outside the building. She was mobbed by the media assembled there — interviews that are now a blur.

“I don’t know how you guys do this every day,” she remembered telling a detective once she finally got inside.

The Bartons have been overwhelmed by well wishes from close friends and family as they navigate the trauma, almost to the point of exhaustion. Bridget took to social media to explain she wasn’t ignoring the messages, she’s just responding as she feels able — some days she can hardly look at her phone, she said.

A family friend bought new Barbie blankets for Gabriella and her friend after the ones they brought to the parade were lost or ruined. Bridget tried replacing the blankets herself at her local Walmart, but when she was bumped accidentally, it triggered a panic attack. She abandoned her cart and drove home.

“I’m trying to get my anxiety under control,” Bridget said.

That means therapy. Before the parade, she was already seeing a therapist and planning to begin eye movement desensitization and reprocessing, a form of therapy associated with treating post-traumatic stress disorder. Now the shooting is the first thing she wants to talk about in therapy.

Since Gabriella, an eighth grader, has returned to middle school, she has dealt with the compounding immaturity of adolescence: peers telling her to get over it, pointing finger guns at her, or even saying it should have been her who was shot. But her friends are checking on her and asking how she’s doing. She wishes more people would do the same for her friend, who took off running when the shooting started and avoided injury. Gabriella feels guilty about bringing her to what turned into a horrifying experience.

“We can tell her all day long, ‘It wasn’t your fault. She’s not your responsibility.’ Just like I can tell myself, ‘It wasn’t my fault or my responsibility,’” Bridget said. “But I still bawled on her mom’s shoulder telling her how sorry I was that I grabbed my kid first.”

The two girls have spent a lot of time talking since the shooting, which Gabriella said helps with her own stress. So does spending time with her dog and her lizard, putting on makeup, and listening to music — Tech N9ne’s performance was a highlight of the Super Bowl celebration for her.

In addition to the spark burns on Gabriella’s legs, when she fell to the concrete in the pandemonium she split open a burn wound on her stomach previously caused by a styling iron.

“When I see that, I just picture my mom trying to protect me and seeing everyone run,” Gabriella said of the wound.

It’s hard not to feel forgotten by the public, Bridget said. The shooting, especially its survivors, have largely faded from the headlines aside from court dates. shootings have occurred in the area since the parade. Doesn’t the community care, she wonders, that her family is still living with the fallout every day?

“I’m going to put this as plainly as possible. I’m f—ing pissed because my family went through something traumatic,” Bridget vented in a recent social media post. “I don’t really want anything other [than], ‘Your story matters, too, and we want to know how you’re doing.’ Have we gotten that? Abso-f—lutely not.”

‘What Is the Landscape of Need?’

Helped in part by celebrities like Swift and Kelce, donations for the family of Lopez-Galvan, the lone fatality, and other victims poured in immediately after the shootings. Swift and Kelce donated $100,000 each. With the help of an initial $200,000 donation from the Kansas City Chiefs, the United Way’s took off, reaching $1 million in the first two weeks and sitting at $1.2 million now.

Six were established. One solely for the Lopez-Galvan family has collected over $406,000. Smaller ones were started by a local college student and Swift fans. Churches have also stepped up, and one local coalition had raised $183,000, money set aside for Lopez-Galvan’s funeral, counseling services for five victims, and other medical bills from Children’s Mercy Kansas City hospital, said Ray Jarrett, executive director of .

Meanwhile, those leading the efforts found models in other cities. The United Way’s Blubaugh called counterparts who’d responded to their own mass shootings in Orlando, Florida; Buffalo, New York; and Newtown, Connecticut.

“The unfortunate reality is we have a cadre of communities across the country who have already faced tragedies like this,” Blubaugh said. “So there is an unfortunate protocol that is, sort of, already in place.”

#KCStrong monies could start being paid out by the end of March, Blubaugh said. Hundreds of people called the nonprofit’s 211 line, and the United Way is consulting with hospitals and law enforcement to verify victims and then offer services they may need, she said.

The range of needs is staggering — several people are still recovering at home, some are seeking counseling, and many weren’t even counted in the beginning. For instance, a plainclothes police officer was injured in the melee but is doing fine now, said Police Chief Stacey Graves.

Determining who is eligible for assistance was one of the first conversations United Way officials had when creating the fund. They prioritized three areas of focus: first were the wounded victims and their families, second was collaborating with organizations already helping victims in violence intervention and prevention and mental health services, and third were the first responders.

Specifically, the funds will be steered to cover medical bills, or lost wages for those who haven’t been able to work since the shootings, Blubaugh said. The goal is to work quickly to help people, she said, but also to spend the money in a judicious, strategic way.

“We don’t have a clear sightline of the entire landscape that we’re dealing with,” Blubaugh said. “Not only of how much money do we have to work with, but also, what is the landscape of need? And we need both of those things to be able to make those decisions.”

Firsthand Experience of Daily Kansas City Violence

Jason used his lone remaining sick day to stay home with Bridget and Gabriella. An overnight automation technician, he is the family’s primary breadwinner.

“I can’t take off work, you know?” he said. “It happened. It sucked. But it’s time to move on.”

“He’s a guy’s guy,” Bridget interjected.

On Jason’s first night back at work, the sudden sound of falling dishes startled Bridget and Gabriella, sending them into each other’s arms crying.

“It’s just those moments of flashbacks that are kicking our butts,” Bridget said.

In a way, the shooting has brought the family closer. They’ve been through a lot recently. Jason survived a heart attack and cancer last year. Raising a teenager is never easy.

Bridget can appreciate that the bullet lodged in her backpack, narrowly missing her, and that Gabriella’s legs were burned by sparks but she wasn’t shot.

Jason is grateful for another reason: It wasn’t a terrorist attack, as he initially feared. Instead, it fits into the type of gun violence he’d become accustomed to growing up in Kansas City, which recorded last year, although he’d never been this close to it before.

“This crap happens every single day,” he said. “The only difference is we were here for it.”

This <a target="_blank" href="/public-health/super-bowl-parade-shooting-gun-violence-kansas-city-survivors/">article</a&gt; first appeared on <a target="_blank" href="">KFF Health News</a> and is republished here under a <a target="_blank" href=" Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License</a>.<img src="/wp-content/uploads/sites/8/2023/04/kffhealthnews-icon.png?w=150&quot; style="width:1em;height:1em;margin-left:10px;">