Lewiston families gather to reflect on tragedy and how to heal as a community

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• Nick Schifrin:

  Tomorrow marks one month since a mass shooter murdered 18 people and injured 13 others in Lewiston, Maine.

  This week, an investigative commission established by Maine Governor Janet Mills requested the power to subpoena witnesses as part of their work.

  PBS member station Maine Public recently brought together members of the Lewiston community as they lean on each other in the wake of shared tragedy.

  Here are excerpts from that program, "Love Lewiston," hosted by Jennifer Rooks.

• Jennifer Rooks, Maine Public:

  We already know there are these skyrocketing rates of anxiety, depression, suicide among our young people.

  And I can only imagine that having this happen in your community, to have this happen in your state, do you pretend this didn't happen and go about your life trying to push it away? Do you acknowledge it and move on?

• Rebecca Hoffman, Maine Health:

  My biggest advice would be is not to push it away, not to push those feelings away, but really to lean into them and to let yourself experience them.

  This event is not something we can ignore. It's going to be woven into the fabric of who we are as a community, but we also want to weave in courage. We want to weave in hope. We want to weave in healing into that fabric.

  And so dealing with this as a trauma allows us to weave in those beautiful experiences of hope and healing and courage that we are also seeing right now.

• Jennifer Rooks:

  Four of those killed were deaf. They were at a bar with a big group of friends. How do you move your community to a place of feeling safe again, given that?

• Kevin Bohlin, ASL Family Trainer (through interpreter):

  For many, many years, the word access has been a huge issue. So, with that initial reaction about the tragedy in Lewiston that Wednesday night, some of the deaf community did not understand what was going on, because captioning was not clear on the televisions.

  That next morning, some of us woke up, and, honestly, we made this connection that there was a possibility that members of our deaf community had been there in Lewiston and had been a part of this situation.

  At that point, the news recordings were not clear. Information had been cut off. The interpreter was not on screen. Later on that day, on Thursday, there was a deaf interpreter on the television, and that was very powerful. That gave us a lot of access and information. We finally could see what was going on.

  Our local representatives are asking questions. The White House is asking questions. A lot of local organizations are banding together to have healthy conversations, and so, yes, tragic. At the same time, it is raising the awareness.

  Rev. Frank Strasburger (Ret.), Episcopal Priest: If we don't do anything about guns, how do we have any confidence that what happened here two weeks ago won't happen again and again and again? Do we really care more about our guns than we do our neighbors and our kids?

• Jim Handy, Retired Lewiston Legislator:

  We do need commonsense gun safety. I have been a long time advocate for that. And it goes beyond banning assault weapons.

  It goes back to limiting the size of magazines. It goes to background checks. It goes to increasing our mental health workers, so that they can be along with law enforcement and deal with those kinds of situations as they arise.

• Rand Maker, Lincoln County, Maine, Chief Deputy Sheriff:

  Mental health is a huge problem in the state of Maine. It's underfunded. This isn't a job for law enforcement.

  It's a job that community social workers can manage, but we don't have enough of them. The issue with weapons, I think it's an issue that we have got to find consensus, we have got compromise.

  If we go to each one of our silos, we're not going to solve this problem and we will be back here again.

• Jennifer Rooks:

  January 3, you're back in the Statehouse.

• State Sen. Peggy Rotundo (D-ME):

  Right.

• Jennifer Rooks:

  How does this change your priorities? What do you do now?

• State Sen. Peggy Rotundo:

  I am totally determined that we will honor the lives that have been lost by moving forward on policy areas that will prevent such tragedies again in the future.

  This experience has shaken everyone to the core, and I think you will see people in support of gun safety measures that perhaps are not there yet.

• Jennifer Rooks:

  Having come here from a place where there's war, where there's insecurity, coming to a city that you believed was safe and has been safe for your family, as you listen to this conversation, what are you thinking?

  Fatuma Hussein, Immigrant Resource Center of Maine: Many of us from my community are coming from war-torn countries, and what we see is trauma after trauma after trauma.

  In a country that has laws and a sense of peace, how does it happen? And what can be done? Because I am feeling like maybe this is not the place that you were seeking for safety.

• Jennifer Rooks:

  Given that we're — and everyone in this community is really the walking wounded, how do we move forward?

  Rev. Thomas Brown, Episcopal Bishop of Maine: I would say that we have to talk about the power of forgiveness and that some of us may not yet be there, but that doesn't mean that we shouldn't be talking about it.

  Every spiritual and religious tradition in the world has resources for this. And that's a powerful way for — not for the hole in our heart to be repaired immediately, but for it to begin.

• Jennifer Rooks:

  When you say forgiveness, what do you mean?

• Rev. Thomas Brown:

  I mean trusting that holding on to anger or hate or a sense of why is not going to be helpful to us in the long term to move forward, so letting go, trusting that there is a higher power. Some of us refer to that higher power as God.

  I think that there's great power in trusting that, together, we can let go of this pain and move forward.

• Nick Schifrin:

  (audio gap) "A Maine Calling Special" on our Web site, PBS.org/NewsHour.