Opinion | The Allen, Tex., massacre brings tragedy home

This time, I was in the parking lot of the Allen Premium Outlets mall, looking out at a swarm of law enforcement officials, responding to a very American form of extremist violence.

“Well, at least the weather is nice today,” a gray-suited man with one of the private security agencies said to me, in an awkward attempt to break the tension.

The beautiful spring sky was punctuated by the buzz of a helicopter circling overhead. In a parking lot next to a La-Z-Boy store, I saw FBI officials carrying cases of bottled water to their colleagues, as they investigated one of Texas’ worst mass shootings on record and the second mass killing in the state in two weeks.

On Saturday afternoon, a gunman — since identified as 33-year-old Mauricio Garcia — walked out of his car, wearing tactical gear and carrying an AR-15-style weapon, and rained death upon shoppers at the outlet mall. Eight people were killed; at least seven others were injured. Three children have been identified among the dead.

For me, as a South Dallas kid, going to the outlet malls on the weekends with my parents and siblings was always a treat, and Allen Premium Outlets was one of our favorites. The mall has a mix of high- to medium-end stores, a testament to the growing economic power of the increasingly diverse populations in North Texas. Just weeks ago, I was at the outlets buying clothes for a trip. I had planned to go back to buy a pair of jeans.

On Sunday, the same sidewalks I would have walked on were now stained with blood. Had I returned home earlier and gone straight to the mall that Saturday, the blood could have been mine.

A local artist, Roberto Marquez, 61, had come around at 10 a.m. on Sunday, armed only with wood and paintbrushes. He helped assemble eight crosses and painted them black, draped the tallest with the Texas flag. A memorial. The tall cross represented Jesus, I was told. All the crosses were covered in flower bouquets and ribbons, some with stuffed animals — a makeshift emotional-processing center.

Standing before the crosses, I heard a man describe the carnage — how he had seen the limbs and shattered bones of children, how he had watched a woman scream in pain as her daughter bit down on her arm, the child in agony as first responders applied a tourniquet to her small bleeding limb.

Fourteen-year-old Ashley Guzman and her family often came to the Allen outlets on weekends. But on Saturday, she’d gone to a nearby mall, which was also evacuated because of a false alarm of gunfire. I asked Guzman whether she would go to a mall again. She shook her head. “No, I don’t think so.”

I saw 20-year-old Allen resident Tony Johnson standing alone, staring at the memorial. He told me he had moved with his family to Allen from Washington state. “My parents chose Allen because they thought it was safe,” he said. Then he asked me: “Would you get a gun?”

He told me he was now thinking about getting one. He looked around the crowd. “Everyone here has guns.”

I was witnessing in real time the variety of social deaths that don’t get captured in victim counts or statistics. How do you capture the social death of someone who will be forever traumatized by seeing children bleed out on a sidewalk? How do you capture the social injury to a child who is now too afraid to go to a mall to hang out with her friends? Or, if the Allen outlets close for good, the loss of a place for families to spend time together?

And is it not a type of social death for a young man to now be so distrustful of Texans that he would contemplate buying a gun? And being trained to potentially kill? If this were another country — say, Nigeria — we would call this an example of youth radicalization. In Texas, we call it “freedom.”

I don’t blame Johnson for thinking the way he does. The thought has crossed my mind, too. The proliferation of guns in Texas and the United States more broadly comes from the fetishization of distrust and fear — of the government, of other races and of one another, especially in states, such as Texas, that allow permit-less carry.

I asked Marquez, the cross-painter, whether he was a gun owner or would ever think about getting one. “I’ve never handled a gun,” he said. He shook his head and pointed to the paintbrushes he had strapped to his chest. “These are my weapons.”

Confronting the aftermath of senseless violence, it was the most sensible and beautiful thing I heard all day.