Chris Breslin: I certainly didn't expect, you know, 10:30 on a Sunday morning standing in the middle of a little league field that I was going to have to make these choices and decisions, but in terms of like what you do, like you just react, you hope you know what to do when you're not thinking about what to do.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: This is tested from WUNC, a look at how we're responding to the day's challenges in North Carolina and the South. I'm Charlie Shelton-Ormond.
Breslin: I'm Chris Breslin. I live in Durham, North Carolina. I'm a pastor and a little league volunteer coach.
I love baseball, played it growing up and am thrilled that one of my kids likes it. We play Bull City Little League with a lot of the kids from Titus's school. We've only done a couple seasons, this past year was our second season, and really just full bore into baseball mode. It is one of those experiences as a parent where you you get to be on the other side of a previous experience. And you start to kind of come full circle and realize some of the things that you only saw as a kid, you know.
We kind of nickname my son Titus, he's gonna be nine in a couple weeks, the athletic director because he loves anything with a ball, like roll a ball out and he's all in and it's life or death. And he's played a bunch of different sports, but he's really kind of honed in on baseball. And so getting to play with other kids that are equally obsessed is really fun for him.
Shelton-Ormond: In the morning, on Sunday, July 10, Chris Breslin loaded up the family car alongside his wife and four kids. They headed about an hour east to Wilson, North Carolina, where his son Titus, was set to play in a little league baseball game.
Breslin: We had just finished a regular season and they pick all stars throughout the league, and we'd competed in Wilson in a district tournament for our district ... actually didn't do that great. We came in third and thought our abbreviated summer season was over. And that probably was okay for everyone. But then we got this miraculous birth to play in the state tournament back in Wilson. This group of kids and families really fun to get to, you know, practice everyday in the summer and sweat like crazy and get to know these folks really well. And you get to travel down the road, Wilson, North Carolina is the home of the NC Baseball Hall of Fame and the Wilson Tobs and this beautiful little league field that like a stadium with a jumbotron with the kids faces on it, like dreamy experience for these kids. That's where we were headed back the second weekend of July.
We've gotten to the complex early that morning. We were the first game through the day and we actually thought we're gonna play in the stadium, which everyone was really looking forward to. And it poured torrentially the night before in Wilson in part of those summer showers. And so when we got there, that stadium was just completely underwater and we moved to field two which is not normally used for our level. We're playing East Chatham and to be honest, they were beating us pretty bad. And we were a few innings in and trying to come back trying to wake up a little bit I guess and just getting ready to start that as part of the fourth inning and I was adjusting to the pitching machine to the opposing teams catcher. They were coming onto the field and and all of a sudden we heard kind of three zooming sounds. Not even really like claps or pops or bangs. They felt really, I almost felt them more than I even heard them or before I heard them. I was one of maybe two or three adults on the field... and kind of the realization of what was happening simultaneously almost for everyone You kind of flinch and then everyone hit the deck.
You know, the dugouts are just chainlink fence, it's pretty open complex and no one is barricaded, and you don't know what is going on, you don't know if you're going to turn around, and there's going to be someone coming at you with a gun. I looked over on the ground and there was a little kid from the other team. And he was really terrified, you could see in his eyes and he kept saying,
'Help me, help me.' I crawled over and laid on top of him. Everyone was reacting and, you know, I think, thinking back, you know, probably my reasoning was, like, I don't know what is happening. I don't know what is and isn't safe. But like, I can't watch this kid get hurt. I would rather get hurt. And we're in the middle of an open field, the complex is in the middle of cornfields and tobacco fields, its very exposed. So everyone is trying to make these calculations of where do I run to that is safe. Where's this coming from and and the bullets actually came across our field kind of from that outfield and left field, through the field of play. Two of them broke out a window of a Honda minivan, of one of our parents that was parked by the first base dugout, and then one bullet actually landed in right center field, which is where my son Titus was playing, five, six minutes before.
Our team was in the dugout, so at least kind of concentrated. The kids on the other team were all scattered in the field. And so the East Chatham coaches were army crawling, trying to pull kids in. That is a big test to realize, like, what happens? What are you thinking about? What are you relying on? I mean, I found myself huddled with this little guy that is saying, scared, 'Are we going to die are the bad men coming, I never want to play baseball again.' And like I find myself, you know, praying with him, and then later huddling with some of the moms and grandmas praying with them. So you realize that the things that kind of rise to the top of your conscience and what tools that you actually have.
Shelton-Ormond: There are videos of this moment Chris is describing available to view online, the moment when Chris is on the mound, and the kids are in their positions on the field getting ready to continue playing when they start to hear the zoom of the bullets. A lot of times in putting together an episode like this, it's a priority to include real audio from whatever people are describing. It's an attempt to bring listeners into the lived experience of the folks sharing their story. But this attempt, obviously can never achieve what it's actually like to be there. And in this case, the sounds of bullets evoke an experience that is painful and traumatic, and recognizing that, in my opinion, is more important than attempting anything.
Breslin: I think we're able to get off the field. You know, within 10 minutes and I was able to find my wife and three of my kids in family friends behind home plate, probably all within a span of 20 minutes or whatever, which was eternal. I think I texted my mom at like 11:01 and that was enough time, about a half an hour, to realize like no one at the complex was physically hurt. We think this is over. The police are saying it's probably over. If you hear something about this, we are okay, at least right now.
It was kind of unclear, like what is next, what everyone should be doing. The police responded really quickly. There were a lot of police there right away. They had dogs in the fields and seemingly like secured the place. And they were taking questions from people including our mom with a busted out minivan and trying to find the bullet that that had busted it out. We were pretty surprised when we got back to Durham and later that evening, we started to get like the local news reports that all relied on the Wilson police press release. We're really surprised to hear some of the ways that that was being communicated. Since they've amended this press release, but there was some note about a car on a tree line that had gotten hit which like it was a minivan parked next to the dugout. They made a really quick determination that it was not an active shooter situation very tightly defined in that it was a shots fired within city limits type of incident is what that initial release said. They also did not report that bullets had actually flown through a field of play and that one landed in the outfield. It was all shots were heard near that complex.
That kind of constellation of either incorrect or smoothed details really felt pretty re-traumatizing for everyone that just been there. I think it was pretty disconcerting how quickly they came to the determination that things were quote unquote safe there now, especially considering they didn't and still now three plus weeks later know who was shooting and why and from where. They've since investigated and found that the bullets are likely, like Russian style short rounds that typically come from like an AK 47. And they're saying that the shots came from shooting at a railroad crossing sign a half mile away. And even that most updated press release said that the fields weren't visible from where that was. So basically implying it was pure accident, someone out and kind of joy shooting on a Sunday morning who needed to aim lower, have a backstop or something which is not at all comforting but I'm not tied up in in a sort of like rural gun culture that is comfortable with that sort of accident.
Shelton-Ormond: A sergeant with the Wilson Police Department confirmed the investigation is still ongoing to identify the person who fired the shots, and that no additional information is available right now.
Breslin: And trying to as a parent and someone who experienced the trauma, trying to advocate for what happened and trying to kind of use that event as a wake up call to a community. But then finding like how steeped in kind of gun culture that community is in is pretty disconcerting and kind of feels like bumping your head up against a wall kind of over and over to feel like you're trying to shout to raise the level of alarm on something that like really could have hurt a lot of people. To be honest, I've never been a gun person. But like in the last three weeks, I've deep dove into trying to figure some of this stuff out. And then this happens at a time when there's a ban on assault weapons, trying to go through our Congress in so it is interesting when you start to talk or raise concerns that I've gotten several times, 'Oh, you're from Durham. Durham has way more violent crime than we do worry about yourself,' and in to which I responded like, I think Durham has a gun problem too. We are not immune to that. Like I live in a neighborhood that I have woken up in the last three weeks because I hear gunshots and those wake me up now. I used to be able to sleep through them. Again, I don't think that this is unique to Wilson, but in some ways this could have happened anywhere but it happened in Wilson.
[EXTERNAL AUDIO OF DURHAM BULLS EVENT]
Breslin: There was a recognition with the parents nothing is resolved in Wilson but we know our season's over and we know we don't want it to end that way for the kids. We don't want these kids if they never play baseball again that was the last taste. It really came together from the Goodmons, Michael and Liz Goodmon Michaels, the coach of southeastern little league and owner of the Durham Bulls to call in these favors and assemble this event that we would bring these three local teams South Durham, Bull City, East Chatham and have a night at the Durham Bulls Athletic Park so that happened on Tuesday after that Sunday morning. Each player got announced on the field, Wool E Bull was there, siblings were allowed to be there, they got to hang out in the dugout. And then each kid got to hit on the field from the pitching machine and play wiffle ball in left field, play kickball in centerfield Then we had hotdogs and food, they got to watch Rookie of the Year on the Jumbotron. They had mental health counselors kind of discreetly located there in those sorts of resources too. So kind of thought from every angle, how to make it fun, how to make it beautiful. And it was, it was beautiful. It was really beautiful.
I had a mentor in grad school and one of the things he says, and I think of it is, 'you can't always make it happy, but you can try to make it beautiful'. And that's what that Tuesday night with the Durham Bulls felt like, none of us were all that happy. A lot of us still aren't and can't be. But it was really beautiful and a real, a real sign of community.
As a pastor, as a Christian, you know, I'm fortunately or unfortunately committed to thoughts and prayers. Like I don't have the luxury of, of utilizing the prayer part of that, right. And so, my prayers have been often pretty angry prayers. But it is becoming kind of by the day more and more clear how prayer and action need to be linked for me personally for for communities of faith and these sorts of things.
You know, calling on God to not just change things, but specifically change hearts like that was what I was seeing a lot in communicating with newspapers and police and people on Facebook chats is like, you're not going to change things if people's hearts are not changed, or if their imaginations aren't changed. And I think God does that not forcefully, but over time and sneakily and through relationships and through people staying at the table, even when you're frustrated and you just want to shout, but to try to engage people as humans and across difference. Despite all the evidence to the contrary things can can be better. We can be better.