On Friday, city employees walked to the new 5/31 Memorial, a park that remembers 12 lives lost and so many others changed during a mass shooting seven years ago.
After their walk, people sat at a table to paint messages on stones. Some of them would be placed in the memorial site.
Bettina Williams, who works in finance in the public utilities department, painted next to Michelle Bailey-Pittman, a former city worker.
“This is a therapeutic session for us,” Williams said.
“Which is also what we did the Monday after the event,” Bailey-Pittman said.
On May 31, 2019, a city worker shot 12 people and wounded five others at the municipal center. The tragedy remains raw for many.
Guided by a committee that included families and survivors, the new memorial was opened Sunday to the public, near the intersection of Nimmo Parkway and Princess Anne Road at the municipal center.
It has paths, a winding reflection pool, a tall “Hero tree” for first responders and others, and a granite wall with 12 lifelines forever marked in its face. A survivors’ grove contains an area filled with stones that have been painted over the years.
Before the ceremony, Williams and Tara Reel, a former city worker who traveled from out of town, entered the grove and gave stones to Jimmy Ratté, site superintendent for the memorial. He placed them among many others.
One read: “This is not the end of your story.”
Reel made it for police Sgt. Brian Ricardo, who responded to Building 2 that day. They served together on the memorial committee.
“He saved a lot of my friends that day,” she said.
Williams and Reel sat together during a remembrance ceremony as names were read. Afterward, people walked through the site. Family members and survivors reconnected. People hugged and cried.
Ricardo, who had first walked through on Friday, led loved ones.
“It's a breath,” he said, speaking of seeing it realized.
Williams walked to her car to show a reporter some stones she had made. She took them out of a box and placed them on a table outside the granite wall leading into the memorial. People came to look at them.
These were made of clay, each for a person that she knew and who'd died. Williams painted one like a beach for someone who loved the water. Another had a cake for a moment that the person and Williams had shared. Others were decorated with symbols of faith, bagpipes and a section of pipe.
“I made them in therapy,” Williams said.
“These are the ones you told me about,” Reel said.
“Yes,” Williams said.
Ricardo saw them a moment later.
“Beautiful,” he said.
Williams often brings them to events for the families and other survivors.
“Just to give a piece of my heart to them,” Williams said, “and to let them know that I loved each of them and some of what each of them meant to me.”
She will return to the memorial wherever she can.
“I’ll just bring my lunch and walk from work, come out here, talk to them, maybe cry, laugh, reflect on them, and go back to work,” she said.
But she won’t leave the 12 stones in the grove. These stay with her.
