- I was shot about 16 years ago,
and I still feel the effects from that day
in every aspect of my life.
(slow, dramatic music)
I was working as a camp counselor when I was
16 years old at the North Valley Jewish Community Center.
One day, after playing capture the flag,
I was walking in with one of my favorite campers.
We decided to walk to the front of the building,
because that's where the rest of my campers were,
who were all five and six-year-old kids,
and as we walked to the front of the building,
a man walked in
carrying a semi-automatic uzi replica gun,
and started shooting,
and he shot off about 70 rounds of ammunition
into the building.
He shot me first, and then he just started spraying.
He showed up on a day when there were
a lot of children there,
about 350 kids at the Jewish Community Center.
And so I grabbed James and I ran into a classroom
that was right in front of us,
and there were a bunch of little kids,
five and six-years-old in that room
with my co-counselors, and I was covered in blood,
and we still heard shooting outside.
Bang, bang, bang.
The campers all looked up at me and kept saying,
'What's all over Mindy, what's all over Mindy?'
There happened to be an emergency exit
in that one room that we went into.
We ran outside.
There was a glass sliding door behind us,
and he saw us running and shot through the glass door,
and the glass exploded behind us.
I had lost a lot of blood at that point,
and couldn't continue running,
so we closed our eyes and played dead
until we heard sirens.
(sirens)
And to this day, I still have quite a bit of shrapnel
inside my leg,
and it's a constant reminder of what I went through.
The thing that I remember most is
when you breathe in, you feel air inside your lungs,
but you've never felt air anywhere else
inside your body, and immediately after
the bullets passed through me,
I remember feeling invisible,
because there was air running through me
that I had never felt before,
and that's the instant that I knew
something, a, wasn't right, b, I had been shot,
and the moment where I started thinking about death.
He shot three five-year-old kids,
myself, who was 16 at the time,
and a 65-year-old woman who was the receptionist.
The ones that weren't shot,
they are, you know, in their 20s now,
and are continuing to have horrific nightmares about
this bad man with a gun, coming in,
trying to take their lives away.
(slow, sad music)
A year later, I tried to go away to college,
and I had a complete breakdown
within the first six days of being there.
A kid walked down the hall with a Nerf gun,
and he was just, you know, having fun, laughing,
and shooting everybody with Nerf balls,
and the second the Nerf ball hit me, I broke down.
They put me in a psych ward of a hospital,
and I felt crazy.
So, I typically have a panic attack every time
I see a mass shooting.
Virginia Tech, immediately after I had a panic attack.
Sandy Hook, instantly panic attack.
And I know, moving forward, I will continue
to have the reactions like I do.
What scares me is not having the reaction.
It scares me when we become numb.
People always tell me that I was in the wrong place
at the wrong time, but, in reality,
I was in the right place at the right time.
I was 16, you know, I was working with my little kids,
I was protecting my kids
and our future as a society,
and so how dare you tell me I was in the wrong place
at the wrong time.
He was in the wrong place at the wrong time.
I think it happened to me for a reason.
I don't think there are a lot of people
that could've handled what happened to me
as well as I have.
I have definitely suffered emotionally,
I continue to suffer.
I'm 33, I'm married, I own a home,
I live in a wonderful, wonderful city,
and I couldn't be happier,
and had I not been shot,
all of those things probably wouldn't necessarily
have happened to me.
But, yeah, I would take it away.
I don't put this on anybody.
But if it could've happened to anybody,
I am glad it happened to me,
because nobody deserves to go through that kind of pain.
(slow, dramatic music)