TUCSON, Ariz. — If you were to hover over El Presidio Plaza in downtown Tucson, you might catch sight of an earthen form resembling a point of impact, as if some object from the heavens came careening to earth and displaced several tons of vegetation and rock. Within this crater lie a pair of symmetrical black limestone pools whose forms evoke elegant gems.
To observe this place is to see a landscape that has been indelibly marked by an extraordinary event. That event was the mass shooting of January 8, 2011, when a gunman killed six people and injured 13 at a “Congress on Your Corner” gathering organized by U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords at a Safeway supermarket. Among the dead was nine-year-old Christina-Taylor Green, who had just been elected to her school’s student council. Giffords, who was shot in the head, survived, but has lived with paralysis and aphasia ever since.
Ron Barber, an aide to Giffords, who later succeeded her as U.S. Representative, was shot twice. He watched people die that day, but he also saw his community rise to the occasion. Standing before one of the black limestone pools, as survivors and victims’ families gathered to mark the 12th anniversary of the attack, he told me, “They embraced us in every way you could imagine.”
