I’ve missed you Audrey. I haven’t spoken to you in a few days. I know you are busy over there at boarding school, but wow, a lot has happened.
First thank you for your post on Laziness. I am amazed how good a writer you are.
On Monday afternoon, I was about to start an inspection here at the power plant in Argentina, when all of the sudden I felt my phone vibrate.
I don’t always check my phone (ok, that’s a lie), but when I read it, Kristi had messaged me telling me that she was at the mall and there were gunshots.
I can not even begin to explain the initial panic that I felt. All I could think to type was “stay down”. To make matters even worse, my phone signal was bad and disconnected. I had to run to an open area of the plant while I willed my signal to connect.
Kristi then explained to me that she was locked in the storeroom of a store, and that there was an active shooter in the mall.
As a husband and a father, I can’t even begin to explain how helpless I felt.
During this, I started posting on twitter, sharing what I knew from what Kristi was messaging me. It ended up being a two hour ordeal, in which people started following my thread as I explained what she was going through and updated information as I got it.
When it was finally over, two people were dead, and several others were injured. Kristi was safe, but a little shaken up. Quite a number of people were following my twitter posts. Late that evening, I even had reporters contacting me to ask about the story.
The next day, while at work, I started researching what had happened. Because Boise is such a small town, I quickly discovered that one of the people that was killed was a security guard named Jo Decker.
Jo Decker was an Army Veteran who worked as a local mall security guard, and had saved lives when confronting the gunman. What was initially confusing was some posts referred to her as a brother and as Joseph, but her facebook profile declared that she was a transwoman.
I posted this information on twitter, acknowledging that Jo was the hero, and that there she seemed to be in the process of transitioning to become a woman. I started using general pronouns to refer to her out of caution. A little bit later, her sister contacted me and confirmed to me that Jo actually identified woman, and that the different pronouns being used were because she hadn’t fully come out to her extended family.
After hearing this, I deleted my previous posts and put this up instead.
Almost at the same time, another regular news article was put up that included interviews with her family that seemed to refer to her as a man, there some confusion, even though the did acknowledge that her profile said she was transgender.
Perhaps, because I was so unequivocal, and perhaps because I was the first to clearly state it, my initial tweet went semi-viral. I got several hundred new followers and multiple retweets.
In the replies there was a lot of talk and some frustration about how her family had used the wrong pronouns and the media. I explained as best I could, how family relationships are complex and that she appears to have only been partially out. My whole goal at this point was to show empathy for all involved. Imagine dealing with having your sibling die in a highly publicized incident and at the same time dealing with the complexity of her relatively recent transition. I am in no position to judge anyone.
You and I joke that I am the conservative and you are the young liberal, but perhaps you are rubbing off on me. I am not a cultural or social justice warrior, I just at that moment wanted to recognize a hero.
And that brings me to the point I want to make; heroes can be anyone. They can be men, women, transgender, gay, black, white, Hispanic, Asian, poor, rich, Trump voters, liberals, whatever. That’s because even though human beings we are flawed (I know I am), we are capable of unimaginable amounts of heroism and goodness.
I love every single one of you kids. While, I don’t live with you, all I can do is to try and set a positive example for you, and when the opportunity arises to point out examples of heroism and sacrifice that we all can learn from.
Jo Decker, former Army Forward Air Controller, woman, security guard, was the first to respond when a convicted felon with multiple guns decided to shoot up a suburban mall on a Monday afternoon. By all accounts, Jo managed to alert and save multiple people before she was gunned down.
I love you for who you are. Kind. Smart. Talented. Jo Decker demonstrated the type of bravery that we should emulate and admire.
I look forward to reading your response. Oh, and sorry for not letting you know about Kristi earlier.
Love, Dad.
Update: my daughters response
Hi Rory. Thanks for the posts from you and Audrey on the mall shooting. I'm writing to see if I can get some information from you on your Micron tweet about the engineers who walked off the job over Micron's Covid-19 vaccination requirement. Please contact me at jsowell@idahostatesman.com. Thanks.