The Library Part Two
I intended to write about something else today, but I returned to the Main Library here in Brownsville. Upon arriving, I decided I needed to talk some more about the incident that took place here and my brush with it.
As I had talked about in a previous entry, the central Library in Brownsville was the scene of a shooting a few weeks ago. Since then, the Library has been closed while the staff dealt with the aftermath. Since then, I’ve found out the shooter was a veteran with mental health issues. Furthermore, I’ve found that in the days leading up to the shooting, the man had become more erratic and acted out in public. I also discovered that two days before the shooting, I saw him at the Library. I was leaving the Library when I spotted a strange man wearing long pants, a high school letter jacket, surgical gloves, a balaclava, a cap, and ski goggles. When I texted my wife about the stranger, she strongly encouraged me to leave the Library for fear that the man would commit a mass shooting. I never thought anything else of it.
A few days after the shooting, I was talking to a friend, and the subject of the library shooting came up. To my surprise, my friend knew the family of the shooter. My friend told me about how the man came from a well-to-do family but came back from the military broken mentally. According to my friend, the day after I saw the man at the Library, he had acted out at Walmart the day before the shooting, yelling at strangers and exclaiming, “I’m not afraid to kill someone.” Somebody called the police, but they did nothing and let the man go. The next day, he shot a 72-year-old grandfather at the Library. It wasn’t until my friend described what he was wearing that I realized I had crossed paths with him. Considering what happened, it’s pretty scary to think how, under different circumstances, it could have been in the obituaries. We always talk about how you never know what someone else is going through and what battles are going on in their mind. That has never been clearer to me than when I think about this situation. It seems whatever he was thinking was heading toward a climax, and he was determined to force a confrontation with someone at some point. In this case, it happened to be an innocent bystander at the Library who asked him to keep it down.
Anyway, the Library reopened this past Monday. Of course, I saw a lot of discourse online about how there should be more security. I don’t know what, short of metal detectors at the door, would have stopped the shooter. I mean, concealed carry is legal in Texas, so they couldn’t do much about it. In any case, it was surreal pulling back up to the Library. I’ve missed it while it was gone. Typically, I frequent the Library at least once per week. So, not having had one of my regular writing spots had thrown me off rhythm.
It’s early voting for the runoff elections, so when I first walked in, that was the first thing I noticed. After that, once I entered the Library, I immediately saw that they had changed the layout. Usually, there were a lot of oversized chairs in the middle of the main room. Most of those had been removed, and they had placed the magazine racks, normally toward the far end, out in the middle. The racks had been placed almost precisely where I believe the shooting took place, from what I’ve read. The new book racks had also been moved from the walkway to the Quiet Room, where I write. It appears the reason for this is to open the room and give a better line of sight. Also, for the first time, I noticed an armed police officer standing off to the side, idly checking his phone. The other notable thing was that there were far fewer homeless people hanging around, even though the homeless population had nothing to do with what had transpired a few weeks ago.
On the surface, it was business as usual. But in the undercurrents, you felt the weight of what happened—an invisible specter hanging over the familiar scene. The rearranged room, less hang-out area, and police presence are all reminders of an innocence lost. One incident in thirty years, committed by one troubled soul, will leave a lingering cloud over this community respite for a long time.
– Ryan
