Odessa is still healing five years after a mass shooting

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ODESSA — Rosa Maria and Rosie Granados sipped coffee on a porch inside their driveway, hidden from view. They enjoyed the quiet in the usually busy and noisy neighborhood downtown on Saturday morning. The summer heat had not set in yet.

Accompanying the calm was a shared sense of disbelief between the mother and daughter. Five years ago, their lives had been irreversibly disrupted when Rosie’s twin sister, Mary, died in a shooting.

And in a few days, this West Texas town would commemorate the tragedy with a monument dedicated to the lives its community lost to a shooter. The Granados try and want to move on, but the pain that week brings is particularly swift every anniversary.

“It’s like time passes, but it also freezes,” Rosie Granados said.

It is etched in their minds: On Aug. 31, 2019, a lone gunman raced along a highway, commercial parking lots and neighborhoods and shot his rifle indiscriminately at civilians. He killed seven and injured 25. To honor the people they lost, Odessans will gather at the local university Thursday to witness a monument engraved with their names that will stand in a newly constructed plaza. The monument represents the shared grief and invisible wounds counselors say are difficult to acknowledge.

The structure, an 11-foot bronze cylinder sculpted by Jim Sanborn, was engraved with the names of the dead and wounded survivors and messages from family members. In its core, a bulb of light will illuminate the writing on the cylinder, a reminder to find light in the darkest times, said Randy Ham, executive director of Odessa Arts.

[Five years after mass shooting, El Paso dedicates a new memorial to the victims]

“Art is something that we turn to in times of stress and discomfort,” Ham, who administered the selection process for the monument, said. “Either we turn to it as observers or as a means to channel our grief, our anger, so to be able to have a place where art is here to comfort, I’m really proud of that.”

It is also a tangible reminder of the event, said Chandra Wiginton, the program director at the Family Resiliency Center of the Permian Basin, a state-funded counseling facility that opened after the shooting.

“It also helps us not forget those we lost, which is important,” she said.

The Saturday before the monument was presented, Rosa Maria remembered sitting on the porch. The family moved to Odessa from Ciudad Juarez in 2005. Her mom wanted a better life for her three daughters, Liliana, Rosie and Mary. The jobs here paid more, and she eventually bought the family’s first and only home. It’s where Rosie, Mary and their sister Liliana grew up.

Rosa Maria wore a gray polo, black slacks and tennis shoes. The 57-year-old put her hair in a bun, streaks of gray cutting through her black curtain bangs. The bags under her eyes were blueish in the sunless dawn. Between her lips, she wedged one cigarette after another. In a few hours, she would start work. She loves her job at the hotel, where she works in housekeeping. It keeps her busy, she said, but she needed to rest her legs first.

She sat across Rosie, 34, who would soon tend to her children, Justine and Joe. They slept inside the house they’d lived in for almost two decades.

A few feet away inside the home, portraits of Mary decorated the walls. Next to one of the frames, the family hung a plaque from the National Association of Letter Carriers, whose members expressed their sympathies regarding Mary, a post office worker. In the center of the family living room, on a shelf above the television, Rosie and her mom arranged a sort of shrine: glass angel figurines, the Virgin Mary and a candle huddled around a photo of Mary. They keep a quilted blanket, a gift from the Odessa Chamber of Commerce, in Mary’s room.

The home is a shelter. Although they are familiar with the neighborhood, they mostly keep to themselves. They were overwhelmed with the attention following the shooting. Conspiracy theories swirled, they said. Rosa Maria said she prefers to occupy her mind with work despite its physical demands.

One event they enjoy is the annual gathering of survivors. It’s a time they get to see other families, feel supported by others in the community and pray. But with the assembly comes the heartache.

“It’s harder every year,” Rosa Maria said. “Like it just happens all over again.”

It took police 52 minutes to apprehend the shooter after realizing he was ambushing Odessans from a moving car. The nature of the shooting complicated the response from the cops, even as multiple agencies supported the manhunt.

The shooter began his rampage after he was fired from his job that afternoon at 1:27 p.m. At 3:17 p.m., he drove 13.5 miles east to Midland and encountered two state troopers near a highway. He fired shots at the patrol, wounding one in the face. That information would not reach the Odessa Police Department until later when he returned to Odessa.

The shooter shot bystanders he encountered on the side of the road, a highway, a commercial parking lot and a neighborhood. Most people were in their cars, a report by the Texas Department of Public Safety said.

When they did realize a shooter was at large, Odessa Police Chief Mike Gerke said his unit was not prepared for the shooter’s mobility. Officers had been trained to stop a shooter in a fixed location. This shooter was not.

When a shooter is mobile, “most of your issues are finding him,” Gerke said.

Gerke couldn’t warn the West Texas city fast enough. At the time, he said, the police could alert residents only through social media and the press. He summoned the full police force, roughly 50 officers, some of whom chased the shooter in their personal vehicles. Eventually, the Midland police and state troopers joined the search until officers found and killed him.

Gerke said the unit has improved in the years since. The police department has license plate readers to track stolen or missing vehicles and those with warrants. He said it isn’t groundbreaking technology, but they didn’t have the resources back then, nonetheless. State Rep. Brooks Landgraf, an Odessa Republican, also sponsored a bill that created an alert system in the event of another shooting. In May 2021, Gov. Greg Abbott signed it into law. It was termed the Leilah Hernandez Act after one of the victims.

At some point in his rampage, the shooter reached the east side of town, where Kelby Davis and her two kids made their way to a supermarket. The family was getting snacks to watch a college football game, Davis said. She wanted to feed the kids chicken nuggets.

While they waited at a stoplight across the street from the supermarket, a bullet shot through the car window and hit the metal of a bench seat in her car. The bullet splintered in the impact, wounding her daughter Anderson, who was just a few months over one year old, in the backseat.

Davis was grateful to nearby firefighters who were tending to other victims. They took the family to the hospital and, within hours, the child was on the way to Lubbock for surgery. Anderson is still growing back the teeth she lost that day.

Today, Anderson is an energetic and sporty six-year-old, Davis said. She’s taller than her twin brother. She plays football, baseball, soccer and basketball.

“Tragedy doesn't define you, but how you grow through it does,” Davis said.

Davis was running around town the Saturday before the dedication ceremony, preparing for a hectic week of taking the kids to school and practice.

In the five years since the shooting, Davis, her husband, Garret, and their kids, Anderson, Rhett and Maverick, try to harvest joy year-round. The family has poured themselves into the Children’s Miracle Network, a nationwide charity administered by the regional hospital serving 17 counties in the Permian Basin. Davis helps raise money and awareness for kids who need treatment or surgery.

Davis, a professor who teaches business courses online for the local college, also leads worship services for various churches.

“We just do what we can to give back that way,” Davis said. “It's hard because this event created common ground through all of us, but we also all heal so differently from it. We have such a visual reminder of healing and hope in our six-year-old daughter, Anderson, each and every single day. But not every family is that fortunate.”

Back at the Granados house, Rosie and Rosa Maria scroll through portraits of Mary on their phones, hoping to find a silver lining, but the memories are bittersweet.

Mary loved Chinese food — spring rolls in particular. Her niece and nephews were like her own children. She smothered them with hugs and smooches. And she worked hard. It was rare for her to miss a shift. She was generous with her paycheck, paying for the family’s gas and groceries. For her twin sister’s birthday, she got her a car. And on those birthdays, without fail, she wrote letters.

“She wanted to make the world a better place, but she was just one person,” Rosie said.

She died on her shift. Rosie was on the phone with her when it happened. When Rosie heard her sister scream, she thought a dog had bitten her, which had happened before. She tried to alert the post office but couldn’t get past the automated system. In the years after her death, she felt guilty because Mary was feeling sick that day, and she should have insisted more that she stay home to recover, she said. It’s easier these days, until the anniversary.

Rosa Maria resists tears every time she utters her name. She has found solace in religion even though she sometimes doesn't understand God’s decision to take her daughter from her, but is grateful for the time she had. Cigarettes, she said, help her quell the waves of grief.

And she distracts herself with Mary’s portraits, where she is smiling.

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Correction, Aug. 29, 2024 at 12:38 p.m.: An earlier version of this article reported a state trooper was killed in the Aug. 31, 2019, mass shooting in Odessa. He was injured and survived.