Wednesday was a day for bitter memories of a bitterly cold day four years ago when everything changed in Aurora.
On Feb. 15, 2019, five employees of the Henry Pratt Co. on Aurora’s near West Side lost their lives in a mass shooting after a disgruntled co-worker opened fire during a termination meeting inside the Pratt warehouse.
For Anita Lewis, an employee at Pratt, that Friday started like any other, until a co-worker raced into her office with word of the shooting next door in the warehouse.
At a city of Aurora memorial Wednesday for the five who died that day, Lewis remembered something about them all – Russell Beyer, Clayton Parks, Vicente Juarez, Trevor Wehner and Josh Pinkard.
Russ was always joking, showing pictures of his dog; Clay had an infectious smile, she said.
She still remembers Vicente driving down the middle aisle of the warehouse in his forklift, and she called Josh “the preacher” because of his Southern drawl, and his penchant for sticking his head in her office and asking, “how y’all doing today?”
She didn’t know Trevor, because as a Northern Illinois University student, he was on his first day of work as a human resources intern on that tragic day.
“He was excited to be there, so he got there an hour early,” she said.
Lewis said Aurora lost some innocence that day, and the world became a darker place.
And yet, Wednesday was also a day to remember the warmth of a community that came together to try to help the surviving families, some of whom attended the memorial event at the Aurora Historical Society located at the David L. Pierce Art and History Center in downtown Aurora.
And it also was a day to remember the heroics and bravery of the first responders who answered the call, particularly the five Aurora police officers injured in the shooting – John Cebulski, Marco Gomez, James Zegar, Adam Miller and Reynaldo Rivera.
Mayor Richard Irvin pointed out that they “rose to their noble call of duty to protect and serve, without thinking twice about putting themselves in harm’s way.”
Aurora Police Chief Keith Cross, who was deputy chief in 2019, pointed out that officers were both “physically and emotionally injured that day.”
“Some of those scars still remain,” he said.
And while it has been four years since the events of the day transpired, Irvin said those years “have dragged very slowly” for those who lost loved ones.
Some of those people, from the families of Russell Beyer, Trevor Wehner and Vicente Juarez, joined in a ceremony to light candles in front of the crosses for each victim that once stood in front of the Pratt building where they all worked.
The crosses, made by late Aurora resident Greg Zanis, along with a fraction of other makeshift memorials left by hundreds of people after the shooting, are part of an Aurora Historical Society display brought out each year to commemorate the day.
Irvin pointed out that it is important to never forget the victims, “to never forget who was impacted.”
The city will soon place a permanent memorial somewhere downtown, a bench with the names of the five victims that right now sits in the Historical Society’s Tanner House museum.
Many of the people at the memorial had a personal connection to the shooting at Pratt, but they also could not escape the fact that there have been more shootings since, most recently in Illinois at the Fourth of July Parade in Highland Park, and on Monday on the Michigan State University campus.
That was on the minds of U.S. Reps. Lauren Underwood and Bill Foster, both D-Naperville, who recently were part of introducing a resolution in Congress honoring the Pratt victims and the first responders.
Underwood noted that “gun violence changes a community forever.”
“I will continue to treat gun violence as the public health crisis that it is,” she said, “so that our children can live in a country where gun violence is no longer commonplace.”
Foster said workplaces, schools, concerts and grocery stores should be places where people feel safe, but have become targets for shootings.
He called for “sensible policies” that will end gun violence forever.
Meanwhile, Lewis said she has vowed to “be more vigorous in the way I talk about mental health.”
“I plan to be more open to communication, more accepting of our differences,” she said. “I would like to see people as they really are.”
