A year later, Borderline mass shooting victims’ families and survivors process grief

 In blog, Crime News: Los Angeles Daily News

A year later, Borderline mass shooting victims’ families and survivors process grief

by Jonah Valdez

Before the dry November evening last year when Borderline Bar & Grill became ground zero for one of the deadliest mass shootings in the state’s history, thrusting the quiet suburban city of Thousand Oaks into the national spotlight, the bar was a space where several times a week, cowboy boots stomped on the wood of its 40-foot by 40-foot dance floor, young bodies spinning and swaying to country anthems and two-step ballads.

The bar’s decades-old roof and walls also harbored a place teeming with both tradition and possibility, where locals celebrated birthdays, proposals and weddings and friends would laugh and unwind, a place that  hundreds would call “home” and where others found a community they likened to a family.

But as abruptly as the assailant fired his first bullet on the night of Nov. 7, 2018, the special space that nourished the close-knit community vanished, cruelly shattered by a former Marine and child of Thousand Oaks, Ian David Long, who walked into the bar dressed in black, raised his .45 caliber Glock and took aim at the crowd.

Ventura County sheriff’s investigators later estimated that Long shot off more than 50 rounds, Sgt. Marta Bugarin said. Equipped with seven high-capacity magazines, illegal to sell in California  but not to own, each magazine packed with 30 bullets, he could have fired much more.

RELATED: Here are the stories of all 12 Thousand Oaks mass shooting victims

With law enforcement officers converging on the horrific scene, the 28-year-old Long, who hid inside, turned the gun on himself and fired, ending the onslaught.

Lost in the rampage were regulars at Borderline, members of its family — Alaina Housely, Blake Dingman, Cody Coffman, Daniel Manrique, Jake Dunham, Justin Meek, Kristina Korisette, Marky Meza Jr., Noel Sparks, Ron Helus, Sean Adler, Telemachus Orfanos.

One year later, the families of victims, survivors, and members of the community of Thousand Oaks and Borderline, are finding ways to move on with their lives in the wake of unfathomable loss.

‘People are definitely more anxious’

“A year ago, I couldn’t,” said Ken Dunham, father of Jake Dunham, reflecting on how he was not able to speak publicly about the shooting and his son. “I was a mess, absolute mess; still am.”

Borderline owner Brian Hynes greets Kathy and Ken Dunham, who lost their son Jake at the mass shooting in the Borderline Bar and Grill, as they visit the memorial at the closed Thousand Oaks club on Tuesday, October 29, 2019. Hynes is hoping to reopen the club and in the meantime holds the Borderline Country Nights in the Canyon Club’s Agoura Hills and Santa Clarita locations. (Photo by Sarah Reingewirtz, Pasadena Star-News/SCNG)

He and his wife, Kathy Dunham, stood in front of the Borderline bar where a makeshift memorial took its colorful, amorphous shape throughout the past year.

At least once a week, the couple visits the site to tidy the memorial, pour water into flower vases, and toss open beer cans that begin to rot and give off a foul odor.

Names of the 12 victims have been etched onto white crosses draped with bandanas and cowboy hats, enveloped by framed photos of the victims, American flags, and a flood of mementos like baseball cleats, bracelets, and stuffed animals.

There are 12 of everything — 12 painted stones, 12 pairs of angel wings sketched on a board, 12 candles, 12 boxes where visitors can leave notes for the family of each victim. Three miles north of the bar at Conejo Creek North Park, crews with the local parks and recreation district hauled 12 granite slabs cut from a stone quarry and fashioned into coffin-like benches, each weighing about 5,500 pounds, lodging them into the earth to form a $250,000 healing garden, next to 12 water fountain spouts at the center of a quiet pond.

The symbols and memorials, Ken Dunham said, help people see what each person killed had stood for, while helping people process the loss.

At their Newbury Park home, the couple has kept symbols of their own. Jake’s bedroom remains untouched. His off-roading truck and greasy mechanic tools still sit inside their garage.

As a part of their way forward, Kathy and Ken Dunham said they have been attending a weekly support group hosted by Give an Hour at which families of the deceased gather with trained clinicians and therapists who host the discussion. The organization also hosts a separate support group for survivors about how to process their trauma.

“This year for the families and survivors, it’s been a year of firsts. First birthday without their loved one, or first Christmas,” said Kirsti Thompson, director of Give an Hour California, which helped organize the support group with assistance from the Ventura County District Attorney’s Office. “Now that a year has gone by, they’ve had that year of firsts. And I think there’s a lot of anxiety and nervousness with the year mark coming up.”

Kirsti Thompson, California director of Give an Hour, talks about the peer support groups she was able to help create for the victims and family members of the Borderline Bar and Grill mass shooting on Tuesday, October 29, 2019 as the one-year anniversary approaches. (Photo by Sarah Reingewirtz, Pasadena Star-News/SCNG)

The group facilitators have specific experience helping people with emotional trauma, among them a clinician who led groups after the deadly Metrolink crash in Chatsworth on Sept. 12, 2008 that killed 25 people.

Thompson said their group has been responding to an urgent mental health need that has exacerbated in the past decade in America: offering support for victims’ families and survivors of mass shootings.

It is a reality Brian Hynes, the owner of the Borderline bar, has been near for years. In 1999 during the Columbine High School shooting, Hynes lived an hour and a half north of the school and had friends who attended there.

Borderline owner Brian Hynes visits the memorial at the Borderline Bar and Grill in Thousand Oaks on Tuesday, October 29, 2019 as the mass shooting anniversary nears. Hynes is hoping to reopen the club and in the meantime holds the Borderline Country Nights in the Canyon Club’s Agoura Hills and Santa Clarita locations. (Photo by Sarah Reingewirtz, Pasadena Star-News/SCNG)

Hynes said more than 200 of his regular patrons were survivors of the 2017 mass shooting in Las Vegas where a gunman fired as assault rifle into a country music festival crowd, killing 58 and injuring hundreds more. Borderline had hosted a fundraiser for victims of the Las Vegas shooting, just months before it fell victim to its own tragedy.

Among those caught up in both tragedies was Telemachus Orfanos, an employee at the bar and survivor of the Las Vegas shooting, who was fatally shot at Borderline.

Give an Hour, Thompson said, is equipped to deal with these layers of trauma that are compounded with each mass shooting.

Outside of the victims’ families and survivors of the shooting, there are also those who knew people that were there or died, or were patrons of the bar, or who simply live in the shadow the tragedy. People within that outer layer of the larger Thousand Oaks community have also been calling Give an Hour for mental health services, Thompson said.

“I think people are definitely more anxious,” Thompson said on a Tuesday in late October, the Santa Ana winds blowing into Southern California. She said the winds are triggers for many people within Thousand Oaks.

The shooting happened one day before winds aroused the Woolsey fire to begin its rampage in both Ventura and Los Angeles counties. Many Thousand Oaks residents were forced to evacuate just hours after the shooting. Some residents lost their homes in the fire.

“This community was just served a double punch,” Thompson said.

Support groups and personal therapy has helped people within the community get through a year of recovery, but that path of wrestling with trauma, Thompson said, looks different for everyone. “Everybody processes their trauma in a very different way,” she said.

Returning to normalcy

After the 2007 mass shooting on the Virginia Tech University campus where a gunman killed 32 people, sociologists at the school, still recovering from their own emotional trauma, began to document the ways communities come together after such violent tragedies.

James Hawdon, a professor of sociology at Virginia Tech, remembered watching from his office window as law enforcement officers swarmed the building adjacent to his where the gunman killed most of his victims.

Within months of the shooting, Hawdon and colleagues began to interview survivors and members of the community. He said the process was therapeutic, but the work was also important.

The study found that the people who participated in activities that were unique to the community — community picnics, religious services, local clubs, frequenting local businesses — reported having high levels of emotional well being.

“Just the fact that a club met, they felt supported and that there was hope that life would eventually become normal again,” Hawdon said.

In Thousand Oaks, the path toward normalcy took the form of what Borderline knew best: country music and dancing.

At the center of the communal effort to hold on to its identity have been Hynes and Borderline.

Within months of the shooting, Hynes was able to partner with other local area venues in Agoura Hills and Santa Clarita to continue hosting their popular country music nights. Not in spite of, but because of the shooting, people more than ever needed a place to continue singing and dancing.

At Canyon Club in Agoura Hills, dozens of people, mostly in their 20s, were beginning to line up for line dancing instructions.

  • “It feels so good to be here though it’s not the same,” says dance instructor Kristal Lynn, who two-steps during Borderline Country Night’s Halloween night at the Canyon Club in Agoura Hills on Wednesday, October 30, 2019. Lynn lived through the mass shooting at the Borderline Bar and Grill in Thousand Oaks a year ago. (Photo by Sarah Reingewirtz, Pasadena Star-News/SCNG)

  • Jasmine Banuelos, 19, and Todd Stratton, 29, two-step during Borderline Country Night’s Halloween night at the Canyon Club in Agoura Hills on Wednesday, October 30, 2019. “It’s nice to have something, a place where everyone can come together,” says Stratton as the one-year anniversary of the mass shooting at the Borderline Bar and Grill in Thousand Oaks approaches. Both escaped out the back door the night of the shooting. (Photo by Sarah Reingewirtz, Pasadena Star-News/SCNG)

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  • Ashley Ertel, 25, line dances during Borderline Country Night’s Halloween night at the Canyon Club in Agoura Hills on Wednesday, October 30, 2019. Ertel, a regular at the Borderline Bar and Grill in Thousand Oaks, lost two friends, Telemachus Orfanos and Noel Sparks, in the mass shooting a year ago. (Photo by Sarah Reingewirtz, Pasadena Star-News/SCNG)

  • Borderline Dance Team members Hayley Kassel, 22, and Jenna Kund, 20, lead a line dance during Borderline Country Night’s Halloween night at the Canyon Club in Agoura Hills on Wednesday, October 30, 2019. Both lost friends in the mass shooting a year ago at the Borderline Bar and Grill in Thousand Oaks. (Photo by Sarah Reingewirtz, Pasadena Star-News/SCNG)

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Earlier, a Blake Shelton cover of “Footloose” hyped the crowd, summoning people once standing idle with beers in hand to rush onto the dance floor.

It was the night before Halloween and the young group had dressed for the occasion: Winnie the Pooh danced alongside the devil, Edward Scissor Hands with Thor, and John Lennon with Yoko Ono. Peppered among the group are former regulars of Borderline, all of whom glowingly recall the place as a second home, and a second family.

Leading the group in a line dancing lesson from the club’s stage was Kristal Lynn a survivor of the shooting and a dance instructor. Lynn, who got her start  with dancing at Borderline, taught a similar class at the bar on the night of the shooting.

The past year has been about dealing with various triggers to her PTSD, she said. The image of the gunman walking into the bar is still imprinted on her mind.

Country music, its songs often packed with rich stories, as well as the communal movement of line dancing has allowed her to feel and express a mounting cacophony of complicated feelings, she said.

“There’s shock, there’s anger, there’s frustration,” Lynn said. “And happiness to be together and to be alive. Gratefulness for just our friendships and our bonds together. And there’s some sad ones about loss and grieving.”

She glided across the stage in black knee-high boots with a mic in hand, walking the party-goers through the choreographed steps. She said most of the dances are muscle memory for her, and it is the repetition of what is familiar that has proved therapeutic. The act of moving as one body among like-minded people, some of which are bound by the night of the shooting, has helped her get through the year.

Among the costumed crowd was 22-year-old Caitlyn Knutson, a flashing yellow flower crown resting atop her head.

As a teenager, Knutson’s love for country music began to spill beyond the walls of her Simi Valley home, and whenever her family would drive by Borderline, she remembered longingly wanting to be a part of what went on behind its unassuming wooden frame.

Knutson would go on to celebrate her 18th, 19th, 20th, and 21st birthdays at Borderline, and along the way, building relationships with others over their mutual love for country music and line dancing. Before the shooting, she would go to the bar three times a week, to dance, listen to music, or just catch up with friends.

On the night of the shooting, one moment she was stepping onto the dance floor with friends, and the next, she was ducking under gunfire, fleeing for her life.

She ran out of a rear exit to escape the bullets, ran up a hill behind the bar, and with other patrons, crouched on dry soil, behind pokey bushes. Once law enforcement arrived, the group was led inside a neighboring medical plaza.

“That’s the most paranoid I’ve been in my life,” Knutson said recalling the moments of sitting inside the plaza. “I didn’t trust the wall behind me. I didn’t trust what was in front of me. I didn’t trust anyone around me.”

After the shooting, it was imperative for Knutson to continue dancing.

As soon as she heard Borderline would continue its country nights at other venues, Knutson was among the first to attend. Though for the first month, she often spent the dance nights sitting in the corner of the room, crying. Eventually, the tears gave way to smiles again as she reclaimed the core of what country music has always meant to her: “It’s really all about enjoying your life and letting things be.”

Knutson said despite the shooting, she hopes Borderline will reopen.

Kelly Iannuzzi, 31, of Encino, who also attended the Halloween country night agreed. She used to dance at Borderline every Saturday evening. Not wanting to accept the reality of the shooting, Iannuzzi purposely avoided going to Borderline. That is, until a tree-lighting memorial at the bar in June of this year.

Hundreds gathered in the Borderline parking lot to watch as officials flipped the on switch for large oak tree near the bar camouflaged in amber lights.

After the ceremony, a DJ set up at the parking lot and began to blast music, summoning people into lines who began to shuffle and step to the song beneath the tree’s glowing branches.

“Of course it would be difficult at first,” Iannuzzi said of returning to a new Borderline bar if it reopened. “But it would be like a homecoming and reconstruction of a house, rebuilding it to be stronger.”

‘That was my norm’

Efforts to rebuild are already underway.

Hynes, who bought the business in 2007, said he is waiting on the city of Thousand Oaks to complete its assessment of the building. Based on the city report, he said they will decide whether to renovate the building, originally constructed in 1972, or demolish and build a new Borderline from the ground up.

He and his Borderline team function out of an office space in Westlake Village. Hosting the weekly country nights, music festivals, and distributing their clothing brand, Borderline Clothing, keeps the team busy.

Borderline owner Brian Hynes at his Borderline Clothing office in Westlake on Tuesday, October 29, 2019 where he runs his festival and clothing line since the mass shooting at the Thousand Oaks’ Borderline Bar and Grill a year ago. Hynes is hoping to reopen the club and in the meantime holds the Borderline Country Nights in the Canyon Club’s Agoura Hills and Santa Clarita locations. (Photo by Sarah Reingewirtz, Pasadena Star-News/SCNG)

Even so, Hynes misses the daily grind of running the bar, filling out paperwork, making sure the ice machine was working, managing long lines of patrons, snaking out of the bar’s entrance, greeting them as they walked through his doors.

“They say to get back to your norm,” Hynes said, sitting inside his new office. “That was my norm.”

Hynes was sick on the night of the shooting. But he managed to put aside his Nyquil, hop out of bed, grab his cowboy boots and mount his truck toward the bar.

On his way, he began receiving vague but alarming texts about the bar. Hynes, switched on an app on his phone that allowed him access its surveillance footage — smoke filled the air. “A fire at the bar?” Hynes thought, pressing on the gas pedal.

When he got there, he saw people running in all directions from the bar. Moments later, law enforcement arrived and Hynes heard gunshots. He would later learn the smoke was from smoke bombs the shooter has used to disguise his movements within the bar.

Patrons hurled chairs and fire extinguishers into windows, creating a passage from zipping bullets and suffocating smoke. One of the security guards at the bar used his fists to break another window spawning similar escape routes, Hynes said.

He helped carry the wounded who had escaped the bar, to a gas station across the street until paramedics arrived.

After law enforcement kept the bar off limits to Hynes, processing what would become a crime scene for the next three weeks, Hynes said the first thing he checked on was a painting that hung inside his office, a realistic rendering of the Borderline bar painted by his step-mom and gifted to him when he bought the place.

He found the painting untouched by blood, bullets, or shrapnel. It now hangs inside his new Westlake Village office.

Unanswered questions

As investigators continued to gather evidence for their report, the question of why Long did what he did lingers in the minds of the community.

Deputies had encountered Long before. In the April before the shooting, deputies responded to a call from neighbors that Long had been punching holes into the walls of his Newbury Park home. After a mental health team interviewed Long, they said he did not meet the criteria for detaining him for psychiatric hold.

Sheriff’s investigators expect to submit their full report on the Borderline shooting to the DA’s office by the beginning of December.

  • The Borderline Bar and Grill sign has become part of the makeshift memorial for the 12 victims of the mass shooting at the closed Thousand Oaks club. A “Healing Garden” is being constructed at Conejo Creek North Park for the Borderline memorial. (Photo by Sarah Reingewirtz, Pasadena Star-News/SCNG)

  • The Borderline Bar and Grill memorial on Tuesday, October 29, 2019 in Thousand Oaks as the one-year anniversary of the mass shooting approaches. (Photo by Sarah Reingewirtz, Pasadena Star-News/SCNG)

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  • Justin Meek’s memorial, one of 12 victims of the mass shooting at the Borderline Bar & Grill in Thousand Oaks, seen on Monday, September 9, 2019 at the closed club. A “Healing Garden” is being constructed at Conejo Creek North Park for the Borderline memorial. (Photo by Sarah Reingewirtz, Pasadena Star-News/SCNG)

  • Memorial rocks for the 12 victims of the mass shooting at the Borderline Bar & Grill in Thousand Oaks are seen on Monday, September 9, 2019 at the closed club. A “Healing Garden” is being constructed at Conejo Creek North Park for the Borderline memorial. (Photo by Sarah Reingewirtz, Pasadena Star-News/SCNG)

  • A wagon wheel memorial for the 12 victims of the mass shooting at the Borderline Bar & Grill in Thousand Oaks is seen on Monday, September 9, 2019 at the closed club. A “Healing Garden” is being constructed at Conejo Creek North Park for the Borderline memorial. (Photo by Sarah Reingewirtz, Pasadena Star-News/SCNG)

  • Ventura County Sgt. Ron Helus memorial, one of 12 victims of the mass shooting at the Borderline Bar & Grill in Thousand Oaks, seen on Monday, September 9, 2019 at the closed club. A “Healing Garden” is being constructed at Conejo Creek North Park for the Borderline memorial. (Photo by Sarah Reingewirtz, Pasadena Star-News/SCNG)

  • Mike and Betty Kelley, of Newbury Park and neighbors to Jake Dunham, one of 12 victims of the mass shooting at the Borderline Bar & Grill, visit the makeshift memorial at the closed club in Thousand Oaks on Monday, September 9, 2019. A “Healing Garden” is being constructed at Conejo Creek North Park for the Borderline memorial. (Photo by Sarah Reingewirtz, Pasadena Star-News/SCNG)

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Hynes said he has collected stories about the shooting, but said he has not brought himself to read them. He has not read the Facebook post investigators say Long posted from within the bar during the shooting.

While driving, Hynes also finds himself avoiding country music radio stations since some songs remind him of the event.

Finish the dance

Throughout the past year, Hynes has let people into the bar — families of victims or survivors — allowing them to better understand what happened that night.

On one of those days, a young woman stood peering into the bar with her mother. Hynes asked if she wanted to go inside. Constructions crews were handling repairs at the bar, but allowed them in.

Once in the bar, the woman walked straight to a specific spot in the room and began to dance. She moved silently, carrying out the nimble steps of an upbeat line dancing routine called “Askin’ Questions.”

“There’s no music — what are you doing?” Hynes said.

The woman looked at Hynes, continuing the dance, a series of toe taps, kicks, and twirls along the wooden floor, and told him it was the dance she was doing when the shooting began. She said she wanted to finish her dance.

All credit goes to Jonah Valdez Originally published on https://www.dailynews.com

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