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In Ohio town, massacre leaves diners, fairgoers uneasy

 

 

PIKETON, Ohio — Inside the Riverside Restaurant, a modest corner diner here where locals gather for breakfast served all day, the conversation turned dark Saturday.

“Did they find that guy who did all the shootings yet?”

The question came from a man in a “Marines” T-shirt, eating eggs and hash with three camouflage-wearing buddies. The question recipient, a short-haired and friendly looking waitress, answered quietly.

“No, and I don’t know if they will,” said Jennifer Beekman, 42. “I don’t think it’s local. And I think it’s more than one.”

Beekman would have liked to have had a better answer to give, something more concrete. But that wasn’t going to happen Saturday, when investigators had so few updates to provide that they canceled a midday press conference.

 

So the locals were left to speculate — and worry. Someone had walked into four separate homes in their community early Friday, opening fire on mostly sleeping victims. The body count would be heartbreaking anywhere, but in this close-knit, rural community, it was unfathomable: Eight dead, one as young as 16. Only three children — ages 3 years, 6 months, and 4 days — had been allowed to live.

No doubt the community would be forever changed, many said. But, with their brows furrowed and jaws steeled, they said they knew something else with just as much certainty: They’d survive it, together. Because that’s what good people do.

“At a time like this, everyone pulls together,” said Carolyn Hurless, 69, of Piketon. “We’ll pray for the family and we’ll do OK.”

There’s no blueprint for how that’s done, no checklist on ways to survive mass casualty. Maybe there should be: Families are targeted more often than many would probably like to think.

Take last summer’s slaying of eight in Houston, for example. David Conley, then 49, was accused of killing his ex-girlfriend and her family members, including a son Conley had fathered.

But when families are targeted, it’s often by someone within the family, according to a USA TODAY analysis last year of mass shootings that found that 53% of shooters are related to their victims.

 

It’s not clear yet if that’s what happened in Pike County. A Saturday press release from the Ohio Attorney General’s Office said no arrests have been made. A “person of interest” detained in Chillicothe late Friday was just one of 30 people interviewed in connection with the case, authorities said.

Without answers, residents were left to gossip and wonder and whisper. Hurless sat in the sunshine at the annual Piketon Dogwood Festival, her attention pulled from the food trucks and cheerful vendors as she talked with a friend about the massacre.

“Why kill all eight?” she asked.

Her friend had a theory. Marilyn Locke, 66, knew victim Dana Rhoden — the 37-year-old nursing aide had cared for her ailing mother-in-law a few years back — and last saw her about a month ago, when the two embraced.

“Whoever did this killed anyone who might have talked,” Locke said, noting the ages of the survivors. “A 3-year-old can’t identify anyone.”

Having known Dana Rhoden, Locke said she can’t begin to understand why someone would have targeted her family.

“I wish they’d find who did this,” she said. “It’s just too scary.”

 

Eight killed. It's just not something Brad Lambert could seem to grasp as he returned to his hometown as a vendor in the weekend festival.

“That’s things we see on the news in the big city,” Lambert said. “It hit home pretty hard for a lot of people here.”

Brad and Lori Lambert have been vendors in the Park Street Music tent at the Dogwood Festival for five years. They travel from Wapakoneta to bring their guitars, repair services, and music.

The crowds for the event were “way down” from normal, Brad Lambert said, and everyone seemed to be talking about the killings. A sense of devastation and unease has crept through the hills and valleys and seems to shroud the flashing lights and waving flags of the festival.

“It felt like a dream almost, seeing all the news stations,” Lori Lambert said of the throng of live-trucks and cars with television news station logos on the sides. The community occasionally sees a car from one station or another, but never this many, and never for so gruesome a reason.

The “why” is what’s likely to haunt residents the most — at least in the short term, several experts in grief told The Enquirer. It’s human nature to try to find reason and sense in trauma, even when there is none.

 

“We want to find meaning in it, children especially,” said Victoria Ott, executive director of Fernside, a children’s grief center affiliated with Hospice of Cincinnati. “In a small community, potentially a lot of people in the community knew the victims. Everyone would be affected.”

To be sure, the slayings were the talk throughout the area. Even strangers asked each other what they knew — “Isn’t it just awful?” — at gas stations and the local library.

The questions seemed tinged with panic. Sheriff’s officials in Scioto County, Pike’s neighbor to the south, released a statement assuring people that rumors spreading on Facebook about more victims being found in homes there were false.

Officials asked residents to “restrain from circulating ‘unverified’ facts concerning the ongoing investigation” because “to do so only hampers the investigation and fuels hysteria within our community.”

Sheriff Marty Donini concluded with a request: Use common sense while a killer’s on the loose.

Eric Meredith, superintendent of the Pike County Career Technology Center, said schools throughout the area plan to have grief counselors on hand Monday. The youngest victim, a 16-year-old Piketon High School freshman, wasn’t a Tech Center student, but the area is so close-knit that he likely had friends there.

 

“It’s hard to believe that this could happen anywhere, but especially here,” Meredith said. “Everyone knows each other.”

Heidi Horsley, executive director of the online grief support site Open to Hope, said the repercussions of a tragedy this large will last far beyond next week or even next month. Plenty of people will shrug off offers for counseling at first, only to realize they could use the help later.

Horsley encouraged parents to speak honestly but reassuringly to children grappling with the deaths.

“Their safe, predictable worlds are shaken,” Horsley said. “It’s important to say that, yes, bad things happen, but that’s a rare and unusual thing. Look at all the helpers out there. They need to know that overall, they’re still safe.”

Beekman, the waitress, said she felt things around town had changed, maybe permanently. She knew the 16-year-old victim when he was a preschooler in the Head Start program.

She wants to know what happened and why. Was it a neighbor? A family member? Someone from out of town or another state?

“It won’t make me feel better,” she added. “No matter what the reason might be, it doesn’t change the fact that there were people who loved them. It doesn’t make them hurt less. It doesn’t change that there are children who are without their mothers, their families. But I’d still like to know.”

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