ALLEN, Texas — The spate of mass shootings in Texas, from Sutherland Springs to El Paso to Uvalde to Santa Fe to Allen, leave each community with its own trauma, its own struggle with post-traumatic stress.
And, as Allen marks the first anniversary of the horrific events at the Allen Premium Outlet Mall, people still struggling with the memories of that day have a path to recovery that all those other cities know all too well.
Kelly is a mom of two who was shopping at the Allen Premium Outlets on May 6, 2023. She and her husband and their son were exiting a store when the gunfire started.
"I'm not ready to go there. It's just a lot," she said of the reason she asked us to hide her identity and her real name. "I'm just not ready yet. Just not ready."
Not ready, she says, to add her own image to the ones still circling in her head.
"A lot of emotions and feelings, and things like that that run through your mind," she said.
She and her 7-year-old son were not injured that day. But the haunting images of the gunfire and the mass panic remain.
"They kept telling us to breathe, to breathe, to breathe," she said of the police who pressed the crowd to move and to seek shelter. "And then we also saw people going down over by the planter," she said trying to shield her son from the images of people shot and killed. "I turned and looked down that walkway, and I saw another body down," she said.
"I'm hoping I can get to the point where I don't think about it at least once a day," she said.
To do that, she and her son sought counseling at The Center for Healing. Sponsored by LifePath Systems it is a family resiliency center funded by a state grant. It provides psychological counseling free of charge to anyone impacted by the events of the Allen Mall shooting. Free mental help that is, fortunately, and unfortunately, not a new idea.
Because in places like Santa Fe, Texas south of Houston the same search for resiliency is in its sixth year.
"My advice unequivocally is to get help the sooner the better," said Jacquelyn Poteet, the director of the Santa Fe Resiliency Center. Funded through the same state grant system and operated by Innovative Alternatives, the free counseling service was established after the 2018 mass shooting at Santa Fe High School that killed eight students and two teachers and wounded 13 others. Six years later she says they still provide services to dozens of people each week.
"The first year being normal for people to be in shock and just trying to kind of put one foot in front of the other and then the dust kind of settling, I feel like that's where you guys are at," Poteet said of the Allen recovery process at the one year mark.
"I don't think it necessarily ever gets easier. I think it's just something that you learn to live with," said former Santa Fe High School student Kaitlyn Richards who still receives counseling at the Santa Fe Resiliency Center.
Near the top of her graduating class in 2018, she found herself floundering and failing at the college level but couldn't understand why. She moved back home to Santa Fe and through counseling realized the haunting images of that day, May 18, 2018, were still with her.
"Anything that involves a moment that you have to grieve for a long time, it's something that's always going to be with you. I don't think it's ever truly just going to go away," Richards said.
Especially if you have the post-traumatic stress of someone like Flo Rice.
"It doesn't go away. It never turns off," Rice said.
She was a substitute teacher at Santa Fe High School. The gunman shot her six times in the legs and hips. Critically injured she stumbled out of a hallway door, landing next to a fellow teacher who did not survive.
"At the moment I realized I had been shot, I thought it was a bomb. That's what I thought. I thought I'd been thrown down by a bomb. And I was totally confused until I looked down and saw bloody bullet holes in my legs," Rice said.
Multiple surgeries included titanium support rods for a femur that one of the bullets destroyed.
"And that instant realizing I had been shot, I was being hunted. And whoever was hunting me was still there. That fear was visceral. And I never truly leave that spot. It's always in the back of my head."
"And my friend that I worked with, she was a few feet away and she was dead. I'm always kind of there. It's never gone."
"Nothing can make that go away," I asked her. "No, no," she replied.
"There are triggers that she has that can just put her back at zero again," her husband Scot Rice said. "And we have to build from there to try to find...peace."
Her search for that sense of peace led to similar free counseling services offered through Galveston County. Poteet says that dozens a week continue to get help at the Santa Fe Resiliency Center operating out of a strip mall just five minutes from Santa Fe High School.
"I think it's really important to have something like this, especially in communities that don't have a lot of mental health services that are already established before the shooting," said Jacquelyn Poteet.
Five miles east of Santa Fe High School, Maranatha Christian Center on FM 1764 maintains its own memorial to the 10 students and staff killed that day in 2018. Ten white crosses in front of the small church stand as a memorial that is still frequented by members of the community who leave flowers, toys and photos of the shooting victims. The church marquee along the rural road reads "Don't count the days. Make the days count."
And that's the lesson they offer to the people of Allen. Healing, measured in months and years, will take time.
"Each community is so unique and each tragedy is so unique," said Danielle Sneed, deputy clinical officer at LifePath Systems in McKinney where the Center for Healing maintains offices specifically dedicated to the family resiliency center for the Allen Mall shooting. "The goal of the FRC is that we help people not have prolonged trauma or mental illness. So what can we do to help that person process and recover from a tragic event so they can continue with their life."
"It's going to get really hard before it ever gets better," said Kaitlyn Richards who says she is now working toward a nursing degree. "But you have to face those things in order for it to get better. I'm in the best place in my life that I ever have been and I didn't necessarily thing that was going to happen for a long time."
"Just keep trying, don't give up," said Flo Rice when asked for her advice to those still struggling with memories of the Allen Mall shooting. "Mental therapy and mental health is the key to learning to live with it rather. Because you have to learn to live with it."
"It's nice knowing that it is available when you are ready to talk," Kelly said during our interview at LifePath Systems offices in Plano. She says her son is still afraid of loud noises. Police sirens still scare him. And whenever, and wherever, they go shopping they have to park directly in front of the store they are visiting. They don't linger in any public place too long. But she says that with counseling help from the Allen Center for Healing, they are both making progress.
"I think it's amazing. And I'm happy that we're able to seek services and that it is available because if not what would we do? Who would we talk to?"