Gabby_ A Story of Courage and Hope - Alison Hanson [86]
Scott called the NPR newsroom and asked how they had received information Gabby was dead. “It’s solid, Scott,” he was told. “We have two sources.” Scott later told me that he got the impression they were humoring him on that call. They were almost dismissive. As a top NPR personality, they thought he was trying to “bigfoot” them—poking around on the news side, where he didn’t belong.
Scott then had his producer call the newsroom to push harder. Turned out, NPR’s two sources had no real knowledge of what was going on. The first was somebody employed by the Pima County Sheriff’s office. The second worked for another Arizona congress-person and wasn’t even in Tucson. From those two flimsy “sources,” NPR chose to broadcast confirmation of Gabby’s death to the world.
Within the next twenty minutes, the network realized it had rushed its erroneous news onto the air irresponsibly. Scott e-mailed me back: “NPR now withdrawing its report.” (The incident was so distressing to Scott that he considered whether the network, his home for almost thirty years, was a place where he still wanted to work. In the end, though he told his bosses that NPR’s recklessness was “indefensible and reprehensible,” he did not resign. He was the conduit for a letter of apology that Gabby and I received from the president of NPR.)
From the plane, we watched the cable networks pull back on their reports about Gabby’s demise. But even though we knew Gabby was alive, we still had no idea how serious her injuries were, or whether she’d still be alive when we reached Arizona. We sat there, mostly in silence. It felt surreal to be stuck in that cabin, 30,000 feet in the air, watching TV footage from the scene of the attack interspersed with old photos of Gabby, smiling happily. I wished the plane could move faster.
It takes two hours and fifteen minutes to fly from Houston to Tucson. We still had an hour until we’d arrive.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Tucson
On January 8, there was no countdown clock. I’m used to lots and lots of preparation for big events. They typically culminate with the winding down of a tiny digital clock on one of the displays on the flight deck of the space shuttle orbiter. As the clock strikes zero, 7 million pounds of fire and thrust are unleashed in an instant, sending me on a planned trajectory at a very high rate of speed. Then, once I arrive in space, I have multiple critical decisions affecting the lives of me and my crew.
On January 8, however, instead of a clock, there was just the ringing of my phone. “Mark, it’s Pia . . .”
That phone call sent me hurtling on a path with no clear trajectory, but with multiple critical decisions that would need to be made on behalf of the woman I loved.
I often think of how Gabby described that day: “Shot. Shocked. Scary.”
In some ways, January 8 is now a blur. In other ways, so many moments feel heightened and will never leave my memory.
The shooter had bought his gun, a 9mm Glock 19 semiautomatic pistol, at a sporting-goods store. He purchased his bullets the morning of January 8 at a Walmart. He traveled to the Safeway in a taxi, wearing a dark, hooded sweatshirt. He came to kill, bringing four magazines containing ninety bullets. The rest of his story—his past, his problems, his frightening behavior before the shooting—is all available elsewhere. Hundreds of thousands of those entries online that now mention my wife also mention this man. So there is no need to give more space to him here except to say that at about 10:10 a.m. in Tucson, as Gabby began cordially meeting her constituents, he shot her at point-blank range and she fell to the ground.
Gabby had been standing in front of the glass window of the Safeway,