For those involved, from victims’ families to first responders, the incident left an indelible mark on their lives.
Ted Beyer visits the grave of his son, Russell Beyer, on Tuesday at Mount Olivet Catholic Cemetery in Aurora. Russell was one of five victims in the mass shooting at the Henry Pratt warehouse in Aurora on Feb. 15, 2019.
Five Aurora police officers – John Cebulski, Marco Gomez, James Zegar, Adam Miller and Reynaldo Rivera – were shot and injured that day. While three of them have retired, two of them remain on active duty.A Federal Emergency Management Agency report done months after the incident praised the Aurora Police Department for its response to the mass shooting, but also noted communication and other issues could have been improved in the event of another similar incident.
Certainly the anger and bitterness he harbored from the moment he heard his son was among the dead is still there. He’s even been known to make a third trip in the evening to Mount Olivet Catholic Cemetery in Aurora, about eight miles from his home and where other family members are buried, including a sister who died days before Russ’ murder.
Father and son were close, with Russ even following his dad’s career path at Pratt, where Ted worked for four decades and was also a union leader. But as the Community Oriented Policing officer lay fighting for his life after being rushed to AMITA Mercy medical center, one of the thoughts that raced through his mind kept him focused on the fight to stay alive.On Thursday evening, at about the same time the city will come together in remembrance, Gomez’s now 10-year-old eldest son Marco Jr. will be stepping onto the ice for his team’s first state playoff game.
Despite losing sight in one eye, Miller not only continued his career as a police officer, he is now a detective with the gang unit, which Gomez describes as an accomplishment that required “rigorous” training and extraordinary perseverance. But Gomez calls himself “a street cop at heart.” And if a call ever goes out there is an active shooter somewhere, ”I will be the first one out the door.”
It was actually a call from her young adult daughter who saw social media posts about the Henry Pratt shooting that first alerted her to the fact that day would be far from ordinary. Looking back five years later, Feiden praises the entire staff for how each one handled the afternoon. But she also acknowledged its lasting impact because “certain patients, certain situations will leave a mark … and this was one of them.”
“As I stood there at the forward command post, I watched teams of Aurora firefighters that have never done this before. It’s out of our norm,” he said. “They went with no reservations. They might have had them mentally or internally, but they just went to work.” Aurora Fire Chief David McCabe said that, before the shooting, many who attended the training did not see its value. McCabe was the division chief of training when the rescue task force training began.
Aurora Police Chief Keith Cross attends a memorial ceremony last year honoring the victims of the Feb. 15, 2019, mass shooting at the Henry Pratt warehouse in Aurora. His overwhelming feeling was that of confusion, he said. He wondered how something like this could happen and tried to process all the different emotions he felt throughout the day.
The school had just recently finished “active shooter response” training, but the focus of that education was getting the students out of the building, not keeping them inside. “We were getting updates … on the news … from parents … the phone was ringing off the hook … it was all so surreal,” recalled Forbes.
By the time the last student was gone, Forbes remembers meeting her husband and oldest daughter in the school lobby, where she was embraced by hugs and broke down sobbing.
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