Sandy Phillips and her husband, Lonnie, sit for a portrait at her friend’s home in Lone Tree, Colo., Tuesday, Sept. 5, 2023, behind a photo of her daughter, Jessica Ghawi, who was killed in the 2012 mass shooting at an Aurora, Colo., movie theater. Suffering through their own personal loss after the mass shooting, the couple set out to help other parents like them, traveling to shooting sites around the country. The trip continued for a decade.
And here is life after: The dream home is lost to bankruptcy. The dream job is abandoned. She and her dream husband barely want to leave the house, much less fake their way through socializing. Even her best friend of decades has tired of her gloom. There will be no vacation. There will be no Christmas. All of that ended with a middle-of-the-night call on July 20, 2012, that caused her to slide down the wall, screaming the same two words over and over.
“We looked like that five months ago,” she said to her husband Lonnie, who had been in Jessi’s life since she was a little girl and saw her as a daughter of his own. Phillips held Wheeler and offered a bevy of advice. She told him to forgive himself even as his mind would trick him into thinking he could have prevented his son’s death. She told him to think of himself first and take the time to grieve before jumping into advocacy. She told him he might lose friends and be the target of conspiracy theories. She told him he’d be happy again.
Sandy Phillips is reflected in her RV window as she looks at the states she and her husband, Lonnie, traveled to while visiting mass shootings across the country, as the RV sits in a storage lot in Longmont, Colo., Monday, Sept. 4, 2023. Phillips didn’t consider it radical to believe weapons of war had no place on American streets. Her parents gave her a gun for her 10th birthday and she enjoyed bird hunting as a girl. She was a Texan, long aligned with Republican politics.
Kimberly loved her American Sign Language class and dreamed of being an interpreter. The last time she saw her mother, they signed “I love you” to one another. Along the way, there were diversions. For months, Phillips sat in a Colorado courthouse while her daughter’s killer stood trial. She found herself in court again when she sued the seller of the guns used in the theater attack, but a law shielding gun sellers ensured it failed.But the journey continued. They made an RV their home and took to the road even more.