By Lynnie Westafer, Salon, July 20, 2019.
For the viewers at home, most hostage stories end with the captives released and the suspect taken away in cuffs. The music soars, the credits roll, and news anchors return us to regular programming. Rarely do we see what happens next — that for many, it’s just the beginning of a new hell. Trauma is humbling — it took me nearly a year of resistance, setbacks and shame for me to finally accept that. Yes, the trapped miners are now free, but some now sleep with the light on. Some soldiers avoid Veteran’s Day parades — the uniforms alone are triggers. Me? I don’t shop at Trader Joe’s.
On July 21, 2018, at 3:15 p.m., I was finishing up a quick trip to the store when a man fleeing police slammed his car into a pole outside the Trader Joe’s in the Silver Lake neighborhood of northeast Los Angeles. The gunman ran for the entrance of the store, opening fire on the police. They shot back; an assistant manager was killed.
You might have heard about it. It was a slow news day and most of the LAPD turned out. I'm told CNN carried it live, and the scene looked like a war zone. The view inside the store looked entirely different. About 75 shoppers and employees hid around the Trader’ Joes, but I only knew about us — a small group kept near the gunman as he and one of the hostages tried to negotiate his surrender. A wounded, scared, frustrated young man, and 15 other people, sitting on the floor surrounded by a trail of blood. The situation dragged on in tense, elongated minutes, then hours. He threatened to kill us more than once. Terrified but furious, I resolved that — no matter what — I wasn’t going to die in a damn grocery store. But I also feared my legs wouldn’t work if I did try to flee. Would he shoot me in the back if I made a run for it? I sat there so long, I saw the blood begin to dry. It transformed from the bright, glistening Kubrick red to a duller rust color around the edges. Would my blood spill here too?
The experience remains terrifying, heartbreaking and stupid beyond measure. Everyone responds differently to big events. That’s also true with trauma in general. Perhaps that’s why both individually and collectively, Americans know so little about the obvious consequences of our violent culture. I worked in TV news for decades where I watched and occasionally interviewed endless survivors of every imaginable horror, but I had no real understanding of what trauma can do to a person until it happened to me. And like countless others before me, I first assumed I was inoculated. “I’m strong. I won’t have PTSD.” I thought. “Sure, I’m rattled, but I’ll take a few weeks off, let the news cycle move on and that’ll be it.”
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