Healing process after a tragedy sometimes public, sometimes quiet

Published: 2007-05-01

WASHINGTON (CNS) -- The communities of Jonesboro, Ark., and Littleton, Colo., have been down the painful road that lies ahead for Virginia Tech's students, faculty, parents and the town of Blacksburg, Va. The April 16 attack that left 32 students and faculty members plus the gunman dead at Virginia Tech brought back difficult memories. For a priest who worked in Jonesboro, where five people were killed on a middle-school playground in 1998, and for the Colorado father of one of the 15 people who died at Columbine High School in 1999, the latest school shooting put them once more into the position of using their experiences dealing with grief to try to help another community do the same. Father Jack Harris, a priest of the Diocese of Little Rock, Ark., spent a great deal of time after Jonesboro simply "being present" at Westside Middle School, as he described it. He wasn't there to be a counselor -- there were plenty of professionals on hand for that -- and most of the kids he dealt with probably had no idea he was a priest, he said. Tom Mauser took a much more public path to dealing with the death of his son, Daniel, who was a 15-year-old sophomore at Columbine when two students went on a shooting rampage April 20, 1999. Without really setting out to do so, Mauser soon found himself in front of microphones speaking in favor of gun control.

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