One year later, scars of Collier LA Fitness rampage remain
For Terry Schuchert, weekly family gatherings are the hardest.
She often locks eyes with someone across the room, and, without speaking, each knows the other is thinking about their loss.
”There's just an enormous hole in the room, a void, and we try not to cry, but it hurts so much,” said Schuchert of North Huntingdon. “Nothing will ever be the same.”
This week marks a painful first anniversary of shootings at the LA Fitness club in Collier. Gunman George Sodini killed three women and injured nine in an unprovoked attack before killing himself. Schuchert, who lost sister Heidi Overmier, 46, of Carnegie, will mark the Aug. 4 anniversary with family at Overmier's Bridgeville church, dedicating a memorial.
The grieving families and others still try to make sense of the tragedy. The injured women healed physically but struggle psychologically, relatives say.
Police officers fight demons of their own about storming the gym after Sodini, 48, of Scott, distraught about decades of bad luck in love, opened fire in an aerobics class. In the room Sodini darkened by hitting the light switch before raising his gun, officers found shattered glass, bullets and blood. Overmier, Jody Billingsley, 37, of Mt. Lebanon and Elizabeth Gannon, 49, of Green Tree died. Sodini shot himself in the head.
”Anniversaries are very hard for many people because it brings it all back again,” said Stephanie Walsh, executive director of the Allegheny County Center for Victims of Violence and Crime. “There are many unanswered questions and for those who lived through it, there's the survivor's guilt. ‘Why did I live and the woman next to me died?'
”What happened that night is now part of these women's history, and they'll have to find a way past that.”
Most survivors of the shootings don't want to talk about it. Yet, in the 12 months since, there were joyous, unexpected blessings.
Lisa Fleeher, 28, of Carnegie, who was seriously wounded, and her husband, Ron, expect their first baby, a girl who is due Aug. 21.
”She truly is a miracle,” Fleeher said. “God truly has blessed us in so many ways, and although I have my scars as a constant reminder of the tragedy I've lived through, I don't look at them with sadness but instead with a sense of courage and strength, to know that George Sodini didn't get the best of me.
”I am truly blessed to have my life and to be able to move forward and enjoy what it has to offer.”
Mary Primis of Findlay, the aerobics instructor, was three months pregnant when shot in her right shoulder blade and left arm. She recovered, and in February gave birth to a boy. She has not returned to work.
Melina Williams, 23, of Collier, who was seriously injured, rarely talks about that night, said her father, Tony Williams. She was standing in front of Sodini when he began shooting. In the large mirror at the front of the room, she watched him walk in, put down a black duffel bag and take out two guns. He fired one at the mirror.
”The mirror exploded, and she just ran and hid behind a punching bag,” Tony Williams said.
His daughter struggled during the past year, he said. A recent Duquesne University graduate when the shooting happened, she recently passed the state nursing board exams she delayed while recovering from a bullet wound to the leg. She works at UPMC Mercy hospital in Uptown, treating gunshot victims in the emergency room.
In June, she returned to LA Fitness, where she takes classes in the same room.
”When you watch people get murdered and you know you're probably next on the list, how do you ever move past that?” Tony Williams said.
Chaos and tragedy
In his mind, Scott police Officer Shane McGrath sees the details.
He aimed his rifle forward as he burst through the gym doors. To his right, he saw the swimming pool; to the left, a child care room. Streaming toward him were dozens of people, some wearing bloodstained T-shirts and shorts, screaming for help.
He couldn't help; he had to find the shooter.
McGrath, Bridgeville police Officer James Lancia and Heidelberg police Officer Adam Helf soon were joined by Scott police Officer Shawn Artlet, Bridgeville Officer Roger Itzel and South Fayette Officers Bryan Monyak and John Leininger.
”I can't really remember any noises or sounds, but I remember blood,” Helf said. “Clothes and shoes were scattered everywhere.”
The shrill keen of a fire alarm wailed. Police radios clipped to their uniforms bellowed a suspect's description. They marched to the aerobics room in the rear of the building, through an open area where “the only things to hide behind were exercise bikes and weights,” McGrath said.
”The description was a white male in gym clothes; that was half the people in there. I've been to Iraq and I've seen a lot of terrible things, but what I saw that night was the closest thing in this country I've seen to violent combat,” said McGrath, a Marine and law officer for 13 years.
The gym closed for weeks while crews cleaned and remodeled the interior. Company officials declined to talk for this story.
”It was awful what happened here, just terrible. But you can't live your life by a random event,” said Michel Cercone, 36, who joined four months after the shootings.
Lancia said officers found among Sodini's papers in his Orchard Spring Road home in Scott detailed plans to shoot women. He picked that aerobics class because its members were mostly women. He planned what he would wear, and practiced marching into the gym, to that room, and even turning off the lights. If he lost the courage to attack Aug. 4, he planned to go the next night, Lancia said.
”The gym is supposed to be a place where you go to better yourself, and that's what these women were doing,” Lancia said. “That's what makes it so tragic.”
A painful year
Jody Billingsley's mother lost her only daughter, her best friend. Her memory for life's details suffers a year later.
As Judy Billingsley of Utica in Venango County talks about her daughter's many friends, love of God and life motto -- “If better is possible, good is not enough” -- she often pauses to remember a word or name. Her husband, Leon, quietly prompts her. The Billingsleys sold their daughter's home and moved her belongings into their home, garage and barn.
”I can't bear to part with any of it,” Judy Billingsley said through tears. “... I never thought I'd outlive my daughter. When this happened, it took my life, too.”
Judy Billingsley hasn't returned to work as a registered nurse. She was talking with Jody on the phone as her daughter drove to the gym, about Jody's plan to get a pedicure and manicure with her sister-in-law for an upcoming reunion. Jody called her brother as she walked into the gym, minutes before she died.
Her mother hasn't read the journal Jody kept. “Maybe one day I can read it, but not now.”
Schuchert said her large family traditionally plans summer weekends during Easter dinner. Heidi Overmier was a single mother to son Ian, 16, who moved to live with his father in Charleston, S.C., five days after she died.
”He's quiet and doesn't say much, so it's hard to know what he's thinking,” Schuchert said. “But he's a good kid, a sweet kid. Heidi did an amazing job raising him.”
Schuchert, her two sisters and brother often paused to cry while cleaning Overmier's home. “We really struggled with that. ... We had to sort through her purse and her private things. That was a very, very hard thing to do.” They made keepsake boxes for Ian.
Moving forward
McGrath sought counseling beyond that offered immediately to police, paramedics and other emergency workers who responded that night to the chaos at Great Southern Shopping Center.
A K-9 officer whose partner, Lord, remained in the cruiser, McGrath is still bothered by the fact that he had to pull people at gunpoint from lockers, bathroom stalls and locked rooms where they hid -- because he didn't know who might be the shooter.
”Every time I drive into that parking lot, I get a feeling, a chill,” he said. “I think about it all the time, and images from that night, that aerobics room, pop into my mind a lot.”
Helf, who works out at LA Fitness, didn't realize how much the events affected him until the debriefing session.
”There were people lying on the ground, bleeding and begging for help, and we couldn't stop because we were there for the shooter,” Helf said. “That still bothers me.”
Judy Yupcavage of the Pennsylvania Coalition Against Domestic Violence said the gym goers and those who helped them likely suffered post-traumatic stress syndrome.
The hurt extended to others in the community, because the shootings happened at a place where people go to “feel healthy and do something good for themselves,” said Walsh of the Center for Victims of Violence and Crime.
”So many of us identified with this tragedy because it could have been any one of us, our daughters, nieces, friends,” she said. “There is no timeline on moving past this.”
Amy Tucker, 37, of Bridgeville, an LA Fitness member for years, often brings her son, Benjamin, 5, to play in the child care room while she works out. Crews replaced a wall of the aerobics room with a window, she said.
”Now you can be anywhere in the gym and see into the group exercise room,” Tucker said. “And if you're in that room, you can see everyone who comes by or comes in. That's comforting.”
