There are still more questions than answers surrounding the mass shooting at a child’s birthday party in Stockton over Thanksgiving weekend, and the grief is palpable across the region.
When it was discovered that one of the four victims killed in the massacre was Amari Peterson, a 14-year-old basketball and football player and student in Modesto, the community rallied behind his family and began gathering resources and planning memorials.
The brazen shooting, which so far has resulted in no arrests, also injured 13 people. Mental health experts say creating spaces for grief at group, family and personal levels are necessary to process a trauma experienced by the entire community.
“Something good has to come out of this,” said Michael Estrada, director of the Central Valley Hornets League, a youth basketball organization based in Salida.
Estrada said Amari and his siblings had been with the league for years, and there was no doubt that Amari would have continued on to a junior varsity or varsity team as he entered high school next year.
Worn down by a flood of calls from media outlets he didn’t recognize, Estrada is redirecting his energy into planning fundraisers for the Petersons. He said the CV Hornets plan to host annual basketball fundraising tournaments in Amari’s name to remember him.
“Whatever the family wants to do with those funds is up to them,” he told The Modesto Focus.
“If they want to create a scholarship for kids in the community or donate it to gun violence prevention groups, they can decide.”
The Petersons are also heavily involved in the local football community. Amari played on the Central Saints Youth Football team. And before that, he played both offensive and defensive positions during his time with the Ceres Junior Bulldogs.
Joe Estrada, president of the Ceres Junior Bulldogs Football and Cheer, said he has been in constant contact with the Petersons since the news broke about Amari’s death.
For the city of Ceres’ Christmas Tree Lane Parade on Saturday, the family and members of the Bulldog community decorated the group’s float as a memorial to Amari.
“Down at the parade, so many people were yelling for Amari, ‘Justice for Amari.’ There’s just so much community support for the whole thing. We don’t want to see any more gun violence,” Estrada said.
Gun violence from a public health standpoint
Experts describe the mass shooting as community trauma that will require several steps to process grief and create gun violence prevention plans.
Dr. Garen Wintemute, an emergency medicine physician at UC Davis Medical Center and a researcher on violence and director of the Centers for Violence Prevention at UC Davis, said he is always available for local groups seeking resources.
“It’s really important to allow space for the grief because Modesto has lost a loved one and needs to process that, but oftentimes beginning right from the day it happens, people are wondering, ‘How can we transmute this into something good? How can we honor (his) memory in a way that brings benefit to the community?’ ” he said.
Depending on the type of organization, Wintemute can provide connections to groups working on violence prevention and education for health care professionals through the Bullet Points Project.
Because of the nature of the shooting and rumors about possible gang connections to the violence, anticipatory grief may arise. Wintemute said it’s important to take note of survivor’s guilt and fear resulting from the crime.
“In this context, the term survivor doesn’t mean shot and not killed,” he said. “It means touched by violence. So it can be somebody who saw a scary video.”
Wintemute has seen how anticipatory grief, or distress from an expected loss, is another issue to look out for, as it can negatively impact our health.
“The key to dealing with anticipatory grief is knowing that it’s coming and knowing how it can manifest itself, knowing about the physical manifestations of grief, that chest pain can be grief, shortness of breath can be grief. … As an ER doc, this past weekend, I probably saw half a dozen young children with chest pain,” he said. “It’s a real thing.”
Fear as a result of the tragedy is another effect with toxic results. Wintemute said he’s concerned this tragedy will lead to people purchasing a firearm out of fear of safety for themselves, their family and especially children.
“The tragedy, the ironic tragedy, is that tragedy number one, the death that we’re talking about, leads to decisions to purchase firearms,” he said.
He said these thoughts are completely understandable, but following through can actually put the community at further risk.
In California, he said, bringing a gun into a home where there are no guns at least doubles the rate of homicide and suicide in that space. For some people, it can triple it. For women, the rate goes up more than 30 times the average.
In Stanislaus County, gun shows, gun ranges and gun sports are common. He said those who are familiar with firearms likely have precautions in place in their homes and therefore pose less of a risk.
But, he added, “The problem is with guns that are purchased for protection, which is what we’re talking about here.
“If I want a gun for protection, and I’m anticipating using it that way, then it’s got to be available to me in three seconds, at 3 in the morning when I hear a stranger’s footsteps in the hallway. And it’s that ease of access, that time and time and time again is associated with tragedy,” he said.
Free, trauma and grief resources
Modesto City Schools released a statement following the news of Amari’s death. According to the Ceres Courier, he was a student at Prescott Junior High in the Stanislaus Union School District.
Should any MCS students feel the need to talk with a counselor, all 34 schools within the district “have a true mental health clinician on site between three to five days per week”, spokeswoman Sharokina Shams wrote in an email.
Jessica’s House, a nonprofit that provides free grief support for children, teens and young adults and their families is another resource.
The organization, opened in Modesto in 2012, runs multiple support groups. Anyone can use their services, and it is not income or residency restricted.
Jessica’s House Executive Director Erin Nelson said both adults and children can benefit from additional support after a community experiences trauma like this.
Adults should not try to shoulder this alone, Nelson said. In order to properly support their children, it is important to lean on friends and family, be honest about any anxieties they’re having and do something to create predictability and safety in their day, she said.
“We can’t always guarantee them that nothing bad will happen, but we can always reassure them that these types of events are relatively rare,” Nelson said. “The best thing we can do for children is to really assure them, just reassure them with our own physical presence as parents and the adults in their lives.”
This way, the adults will be able to talk with their child about their worries in age-appropriate ways.
“A lot of times, children will really lead the adult in what they need to hear. And so it’s really asking, responding to the questions that they’re asking, but not going beyond that,” Nelson said.
“We have many resources on our website for how to talk to children about death, and I think for adults too, being able to just model just healthy coping and being available and also validating their feelings that you felt sad too.”
Some of the sessions that Jessica’s House hosts for free include discussions about the death of a parent or sibling and hope after suicide. These support groups are held every other week in Turlock.
Right now, Nelson said taking part in community ceremonies is a big part of the healing process.
At 5:30 p.m. Tuesday, the Ceres Bulldog league hosted a candlelight vigil to mourn as a community and show support for the Peterson family.
“It’s a sad moment, but at the same time this is our calling,” Estrada said, adding that his team had collected cookies and other donations to distribute to the crowd during the vigil.
The service was slated to close with Michael Jackson’s “We Are The World.”
“We’re just here to help the family grieve,” Estrada said. “This is hard, we’ve never done this for a child. But we can pray with the family. Having to put this together during the holiday season is so hard to deal with. We cry almost every night. We just want to say our prayers with the family and bring our community together.”
Modesto Focus Editor Marijke Rowland contributed to this report.
Vivienne Aguilar is a reporter for The Modesto Focus, a project of the Central Valley Journalism Collaborative. Contact Aguilar at vivienne@cvlocaljournalism.org.