The word “senseless” doesn’t really do justice to what happened a year ago in Fordyce, but it seems to be the best description of what happened on that dark day.
A local man that everyone knew, or knew of through his family, opened fire on random people in or near a grocery store, according to authorities and the crimes he is now charged with. Four people with likely not a lot more on their minds than what they needed to buy or who were heading home with what they had bought were gunned down and their lives ended. Another 11 were injured in the rampage.
Some of the other horrific stories around the country of this nature have some semblance of a reason — a white nationalist opens fire in a Black church, for instance — even if that reason is abhorrent.
In Fordyce, if the shooter was taking sides against some group, it’s unclear what group that would be. From this vantage point, it was a man with a gun and people to shoot at, as if that was going to fix things in his messed up head.
Independent reporting for Pine Bluff & Jefferson County since 1879.
Various media, including this newspaper, have descended on Fordyce in the past week as a “Hey, how are you all doing?” And from the sounds of it, residents are doing about as well as can be expected. The day, the loss, the upheaval are all still right there in the windshield every single day. Parents are without children, children are without parents. Questions like “When is mommy coming home?” add to the torment.
People are more prayerful, depending on a higher power to make sense of what happened and provide some peace along the way.
People are also more aware of their surroundings. Fordyce is a small town and people live there for many reasons, not the least of which are that it’s home and it’s comfortable. The shooting obliterated all of that, taking what is something the country has grown used to seeing — but something that happens far away — to something that is now inescapably local.
On the anniversary, a preacher spoke and balloons were released, some with messages to lost loved ones and friends.
“I pray about it every day and pray for the families who were affected and try to get past it,” said Kervin Sumler, a Fordyce native. “It’s something you never get past, but … you got to stay prayed up and hope and pray it never happens again and all the ones who were affected can try to recover a little bit.”
They say time heals all wounds, but that is a useless idiom in times like this. Maybe the passage of time dilutes the pain Fordyce is going through as life goes on for those left behind. But there’s no healing here, just acceptance of a senseless tragedy that changed everything.