Stoicism, resilience and even heroism are qualities attributed to the locals, writes LARA MARLOWEin Tucson
THE SCENE of the crime that left six dead and 14 wounded on Saturday was quiet before the minute of silence that President Obama decreed yesterday morning. At the last moment, a woman sped into the parking lot and came to an abrupt halt in front of the yellow tape that says “Sheriff’s Line – Do Not Cross”.
“I felt compelled to be here,” Jane Schlamowitz (49) blurted out several times before joining other bystanders.
The crime investigators had gathered in a circle, beyond the yellow tape, in front of the Safeway supermarket where Jared Lee Loughner shot congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords in the head before spraying 19 other people with semiautomatic weapon fire.
They seemed to be praying, and perhaps they were. On their backs, the letters FBI were emblazoned in yellow on a field of navy.
Next door to the Safeway, the employees of Walgreen’s pharmacy lined up under the portico, their hands clasped before them. Some had tears in their eyes. Most stared at the ground. A half dozen television cameras filmed the scene.
“I just felt connected to the nine-year-old girl,” Mrs Schlamowitz said, “because I have a nine-year-old son.” Then she repeated the myth of divided societies: “Tucson is a tight-knit community. We all care very much about each other.”
On right-wing websites, there have been calls for the resignation of Sheriff Clarence Dupnik since he suggested that Arizona’s political vitriol, “prejudice and bigotry” may have somehow incited a mentally unbalanced 22- year-old to go on his murderous rampage.
Though she blamed the media for inflaming passions, the Tucson housewife did not like the confrontational tone of US politics. “There are too many people playing Republicans versus Democrats,” she said. “It’s become a war, and that’s wrong.”
Would the massacre change Arizona? “No,” Schlamowitz said. “At the moment, people are walking around and they’re numb. But in a week or two, it will wear off. This is a very, very sad time for Arizona and for the nation. It will happen some place else. There are more nuts out there.”
La Toscana Village shopping centre is almost deserted. At the foot of craggy desert mountains, surrounded by palm and pepper trees, and flags flying at half-mast, the crime scene is almost antiseptically clean.
“A lot of the customer base has dropped significantly,” explained Casey Lepkowski (25) a Walgreen store manager. “People in the neighbourhood are trying to figure out what happened.”
He objected to what he saw as attempts to politicise the killings. “For me it’s just the individuals, their families. Gabby Giffords’s brother-in-law is in space now. Does he even know about it?”
The authorities have not allowed cars to be removed from within their half-acre perimeter, where chairs and a table stacked with bottled water stand outside the FBI’s caravan headquarters. As we talked, a phalanx of 20 FBI agents and sheriff’s deputies, holsters and stars on their belts, wearing rubber gloves and bootees, swept slowly across the area searching yet again for bullets, casings or other evidence.
Karen Storms (61) and her husband Dennis (56) arrived for the minute’s silence in a compact car with a lawnmower on the roof. They run a landscaping business.
The Storms are “soldiers in the Salvation Army”. Though she is a Republican, she was impressed that Gabby Giffords put on a Salvation Army apron and joined in the group’s “kettle bell” fundraising effort last month.
Like other Tucson residents, the Storms can recount every name and detail connected with the massacre. Karen Storms was most impressed “with the resilience of people”, in particular with the heroism of Patricia Maisch, the ageing, white-haired woman who knocked the second ammunition magazine out of Loughner’s hand. “I ask myself what I would have done,” Karen Storms said.
Compared to New Jersey, where he was a fireman and paramedic until 1989, Dennis Storms finds “a lot of craziness going on” in Arizona. “It’s so easy to buy guns here,” he says.
“That kid bought that gun legally,” he adds.
But gun control is not the answer, Dennis Storms continues. “If you can’t buy ‘em legally, people will buy ‘em illegally.”
Though he is horrified by Loughner’s crime, Dennis Storms shares the anti-government sentiment which affects much of the country and which seems to have influenced Loughner. “I don’t vote,” he says. “I wouldn’t vote for none of these crooks. I think they’re all crooked.”