RALEIGH, N.C. — On Saturday, a day scheduled to hold Hedingham’s annual fall festival, residents of this northeast Raleigh community instead gathered at a local park and later in front of a nearby church to remember their friends, family and neighbors lost in Thursday’s mass shooting.
In the late afternoon, a crowd of more than 100 stood outside the Willow Oaks Clubhouse before five portraits of the victims: Officer Gabriel Torres, Nicole Connors, Susan Karnatz, Mary Marshall and James Thompson.
The vigil’s first speaker was Tabatha Smith, a resident and voting representative for the Hedingham Community Association. Smith praised the quick actions of both law enforcement and her neighbors during the shooting.
“There were residents who were right in the thick of things,” she said. “You called law enforcement. You provided statements on what you saw to help the officers. You assisted the victims that were injured. And some of you put yourself in harm’s way to help others.”
Tricia Preston, a Hedingham resident, led the community in six separate moments of silence for the five killed and the two injured victims: Officer Casey Joseph Clark and Marcille Gardner. In between each pause, Preston shared details of the victims’ lives, their interests and who they left behind. Torres had a 2-year-old daughter. Thompson was in high school. Connors enjoyed going to the movies with her husband. Karnatz was an avid runner. Marshall was preparing for her wedding.
The Hedingham Community Association hosted the vigil, and leaders from the local Capital City Church of God led prayers throughout. Adults and children held memorial candles and a member of the Capital City Church at one point asked the community to link arms in solidarity.
“Hedingham is strong, and we will heal from this,” Smith said near the end of her remarks. “This won’t happen overnight. It may take weeks or months. But we are a community that knows how to come together. We are resilient.”
Changed forever, a community is now ‘family’
A few hours later, as the sky turned dark, residents who live in Hedingham and the surrounding neighborhoods gathered in front of Beacon Baptist Church in East Raleigh for another opportunity to come together and remember the victims and pray for their families.
Church leaders read the names of the victims and took turns leading the crowd in prayer.
Tim Rabon Jr., the associate pastor at Beacon Baptist Church and a Hedingham resident of over 15 years, spoke about how his neighborhood had changed since the shooting.
Rabon wasn’t home when gunfire broke out Thursday evening; he and his family were at his daughter’s volleyball game in East Raleigh. His brother, who lives in Knightdale, was out running on the Neuse River Greenway Trail with his kids, but they managed to leave the area unharmed.
“The whole neighborhood is just different now, because of just the uncertainty” Rabon said in an interview after the vigil. “We have two kids, 7 and 11, and they both kind of dealt with the uncertainty. And it causes a lot of people to begin to question all kinds of things.”
He continued, “All of a sudden, all of the things that were important in life begin to really narrow down to what really matters in life.”
Rabon said he could empathize with the family of Gabriel Torres in particular, the off-duty police officer who died in the shooting. Five years ago, Rabon’s brother-in-law, a police officer in Shelby, was killed in the line of duty.
“Just the shock of, everything is good, and then all of a sudden, it’s not,” Rabon said.
Ultimately, Rabon said, caring for each other after the tragic loss of their neighbors has brought people closer together. On a Facebook group, he said, someone had written that “we were all neighbors, and now we’re family.”
“That has been the overarching feeling of the Hedingham community,” Rabon said. “We’re people from all walks of life, 2,500 homes in the community. All of a sudden, it’s drawn the family together.”
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