It was a beautiful morning in Highland Park two years ago as the small city north of Chicago prepared to hold its first Fourth of July parade since 2020, when COVID-19 put public celebrations on hold. Two friends, Jason Rotter and Martin Rossen, brought their families downtown to celebrate the holiday.
The group sat on a curb, with Rotter’s 3-year-old daughter in her father’s arms. They watched first responders march by. As Mayor Nancy Rotering receded from their view of the parade, there was a lull. Then: a deafening noise.
Rotter’s wife saw people across the street falling to the ground, and told her husband to run. The shooter was on top of the building directly behind them. Rotter carried his daughter between his elbow and his forearm, like a football, and took off. When he reached his car 30 seconds later, he realized his younger daughter and wife were not with him.
He later learned that they were safely sheltered in a nearby storefront with Rossen’s family. They reunited, and, along with a third family, piled into Rotter’s SUV. They drove to his home, where they stayed until late evening.
To this day, Rotter is still haunted by July 4, 2022, when the shooting killed seven and injured dozens. He’s still living with fear, while also working to understand why the gunfire in his hometown was so surprising to him — and to the city and state. On the day of the shooting, Illinois Governor JB Pritzker released a statement mourning the loss, promising resources, and stating that President Joe Biden agreed with him that “this madness must stop.”
Rotter, who oversees procurement for a New York-based restaurant chain, was shocked to find out that more than half of all Americans have experienced some type of gun violence. “It never touched our community,” he said. Highland Park is a mostly white and affluent city with a low crime rate. The shooting completely changed his perspective. “The biggest takeaway for me has been that it can happen anywhere.”
State and local politicians have cited the Highland Park mass shooting as a catalyst for gun policy reform. Since then, Illinois has banned assault weapons, high-capacity magazines, ghost guns, and passed other gun laws. Beyond those policy changes, the horrifying day exposed affluent Highland Park neighbors to the gun violence that many Chicagoans face on a regular basis. It united them with disadvantaged communities in one cause: reducing gun violence.
In neighboring Chicago, there have been 449 mass shootings — defined as incidents that kill or wound at least four people — since 2010, according to WBEZ. More than half included at least one victim younger than 20. During this Fourth of July weekend, 100 people were shot in Chicago. One mass shooting killed two women and one 8-year-old boy, and critically injured two other children. Though the bloodshed led Mayor Brandon Johnson to plead for help from state and federal authorities, it didn’t receive as much attention as Highland Park.
“I heard a lot of people say something like: ‘I can’t believe that this happened in Highland Park,’” said Rossen, who works in finance. “It goes to this expectation that this was a safe, affluent community where this type of violence was unacceptable.” He’s come to realize that the shock in Highland Park reflects another equally shocking reality: In communities where violence is a regular occurrence, there’s often less attention and support.
The severity of gun violence is dulled, said Highland Park survivor Scott Tinkoff, when it’s reduced to statistics. “How many families were torn apart? How many mothers lost sons? How far does that reach?” he asked. “People don’t easily understand until you’re a part of it.”
Turning Tragedy Into Advocacy
For survivors of gun violence, trauma follows like a shadow. The long tail of court proceedings and continuous news coverage doesn’t help. In June, the man who was charged with 21 counts of first-degree murder for the shooting rejected a plea deal that would have sentenced him for the Highland Park shooting. “I would have wanted him to take the plea deal,” Rotter said. “Now these individuals are going to have to spend the next year waiting for their closure,” he said, referring to family members who lost loved ones that day.
“I have abandoned the concept of closure,” Rossen said. The only thing that would allow him to return to feeling “normal” would be to go back to a world where the shooting never breached Highland Park. “But that’s not how life works.”
Instead, Rossen said survivors need to integrate that trauma into their lives. He’s done that by becoming a board member of One Aim Illinois, an organization that combines advocacy and education to reduce gun violence. Rotter recently joined the board and is figuring out how to be a part of the coalition. Not long ago, he attended One Aim’s meeting with Chicago-area survivors, where he listened as they shared their experiences. Rotter has begun to engage his network about his involvement with One Aim. His next step, he said, will be spending time learning about and building trust in the communities that are disproportionately affected by gun violence.
After the shooting, he was inspired by the work of community members who advocated for the removal of some weapons from civilian hands. As a survivor, he understands how gun violence can change everything. It’s like his brain has been rewired. He thinks differently. Maybe it’s not always rational, he added, but he’s always aware of his surroundings and never quite comfortable in public. It took him over a year to drive down the road where the shooting occurred.
But he doesn’t want to forget. “It will help take the worst day of our lives and put it into a different context,” he said, “that we can at least look back and say: ‘We did something about it.’”
Disparity in Victimization
Some survivors from Highland Park view their privilege as a responsibility. “It’s going to take connections and power and clout to make a movement,” said Tinkoff, who is also on the board of One Aim. “You have affluence, you have connections, you have a lot of advantages to make a difference.” As a marketing consultant, Tinkoff uses his expertise to build the brand of One Aim and drive changes in state policy.
Tinkoff and his family were separated during the shooting, but made it out safely. His son, now almost 8, continues to feel the reverberations of that day, especially during summer. “Even if he can’t fully put a finger on it, or doesn’t think it’s that, his emotions spike,” Tinkoff said.
The aftermath of any shooting is difficult, but Rotter said he was impressed by how the community and its leaders handled it. The FBI mobilized quickly. Businesses donated toys. The city regularly informed people of available resources, in English and Spanish, and also provided counselors for both children and adults.
For many parents like Rotter and Rossen, it was hard to balance processing their own trauma while also helping their kids cope. “My daughter asked me: Is the bad man going to come back?” Rotter said. He had to explain to his 4-year-old that the police had the shooter. “We told our kids that we were all scared,” he said. “She at least knew that it wasn’t just her.”
Many survivors in Chicago don’t get the opportunity to share that same assurance because shooters who kill are rarely caught. Delphine Cherry had four children, but two of them were killed by gunfire. Cherry lost her daughter Tyesa, 16, in 1992; Tyesa was a bystander in a shooting outside a Chicago movie theater. Twenty years later, Cherry lost her 20-year-old son Tyler, just outside of her home in Hazel Crest, a suburb south of Chicago. Her son’s killer was never found.
“It was just so many questions that needed to be answered and nobody could answer them,” Cherry said.
In Highland Park, the shooter is seen as “a bad actor in a nice, beautiful, affluent community,” Tinkoff said. But other areas are stigmatized for the violence inflicted upon them. “They’re victims twice,” he said.
Cherry feels a disparity when it comes to recovery in Black and brown communities. “It bothers me,” she said. “There is a different prioritization.” She’s asked several different government officials why they don’t provide the same level of resources following everyday shootings. “They told me that they did not have the funds, and that broke my heart,” Cherry said. “Everybody should be treated equally.”
The response toward the mass shooting in Highland Park compared to those in Chicago is stark. On that same weekend two years ago, Cherry said, Chicago faced two of its own mass shootings. “Black and brown communities get ignored all the time in mass shootings because people now think it’s the norm,” she said. “It’s not the norm for people to get shot.”
Rossen, Rotter, and Tinkoff knew of gun violence and understood it to be a problem, but it took living through it for them to wake them up to the daily reality of their neighbors in Chicago. Sometimes it’s frustrating, Rossen said, when change doesn’t happen as fast as they want, or that there isn’t as much support for gun reform as they would hope.
Advocates have made progress in passing legislation that removes firearms from the community, he said, but there’s more work to be done. They want more support for survivors, more shooters to be arrested, and preventative measures that improve the environments of people enmeshed in gun violence.
In Chicago, “we have mass shootings every day,” Cherry said. “It took Highland Park to have a mass shooting for it to get some notoriety.” In her eyes, having its survivors as peers in the fight against gun violence is a good thing. “People are listening to us, and Illinois is on the map.”
