Here’s what people remember about the Kroger shooting in Louisville a year ago and what they say has both changed and stayed the same.
It’s been a year since shootings at the Jeffersontown Kroger left two African Americans dead and residents around Louisville are left trying to cope with what happened that day.
“Hate has no color, and that day, there was so much hate,” said Eric Deacon, an EMT who performed CPR on one of the victims, 67-year-old Vickie Lee Jones, as she lay bleeding in the parking lot.
Just moments before, 69-year-old Maurice Stallard had been shot in the back of the head while shopping for poster board with his grandson.
Gregory Bush, the alleged gunman, now faces murder and hate crime charges in the Oct. 24, 2018, incident, just one in a string of racially charged and public shootings that this year grew to include massacres in Dayton, Ohio, and El Paso, Texas.
As Bush sits at the correctional psychiatric center in La Grange awaiting a second opinion on his competency to stand trial, community members are still trying to understand what happened here.
Kroger is facing two lawsuits from the families of Jones and Stallard, whose families did not want to talk about the impact of the shootings for this story.
Pastor Kevin Nelson, whose predominately black First Baptist Church of Jeffersontown had a near encounter with Bush, said worshipers there may now be more focused on the opposite of hate — love.
And Jeffersontown Mayor Bill Dieruf, who was quick to say in the wake of the shootings that they wouldn’t define the community, still believes they didn’t.
“I think it’s come to a point now that we realize the value of life,” Dieruf said, “and the value of time.”
Here’s more of what he and other members of the community had to say:
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Sadiqa Reynolds, Louisville Urban League’s president and CEO
Losing someone you love to violence is horrific, and after such a sudden and painful loss, it’s normal to focus on self-preservation, said Louisville Urban League President and CEO Sadiqa Reynolds.
It’s normal to just hunker down and try to get through it.
“I think as a family, what you want to do is just to recoil and kind of just go into self-protective mode,” she said. “And that means not putting yourself out there. That means not pushing for change.”
Urban League leader: Hate crime charges in Kroger killings show ‘we will not tolerate hate’
But Stallard’s and Jones’ families have shown up for their community and used their voices to effect change, Reynolds said. It meant a lot, for example, when they came to last fall’s “Stronger than Hate” rally.
“They are standing up in this space that unfortunately only they can walk in, and they are trying to change outcomes for the rest of us,” she said. “It really takes a lot of courage to be able to do that.
“I think it is a testimony to their resilience. But we can never forget: It is a reminder to us that there are no safe spaces and that hate speech can and often does lead to hateful acts.”
As a part of this community, people have an obligation to make sure they’re paying attention and calling out the bad guys, she said.
“We just have to.”
Source: Louisville Kroger shooting: A year later, community reflects
