On July 4, Highland Park remembers, together
Kristina Donovan returned to Highland Park from Louisiana on Tuesday. A year after she survived the mass shooting at the suburban town’s Fourth of July parade while visiting from out of state, she felt compelled to come back.
“I need to stand where I stood, and pray where I saw people go down,” she said.
She joined a crowd of thousands in Highland Park who attended memorial services marking the anniversary of the day a shooter killed seven people and shot dozens more at the suburban holiday parade one year ago.
People gathered outside City Hall for a memorial ceremony before walking en masse along the street where the shooting occurred. Community leaders praised the town’s resilience and honored the memory of the victims of the shooting.
Before the ceremony, Donovan sat on a shaded park bench, scrolling through photos she took just minutes before the shots broke out. Tears rolled down her face. She had been visiting her daughter when the shooting happened, she said. Back home, she hasn’t been surrounded by the signs of hope and healing dotting the city, she added.
“Everybody heals differently, and everybody processes grief differently,” the 54-year-old said. “We’ve dealt with it all year. We just need today for our memories.”
As people poured past metal detectors to attend the morning ceremony, many stopped at the temporary garden memorial honoring the shooting’s victims. Painted stones were stacked in a fountain bed. Seven red roses lay among them.
Nicole Polarek’s children petted a blond comfort dog. She crouched down and touched her son’s hair. Standing a moment later, she leaned her head on her husband’s shoulder.
“I feel comforted that we’re all together. People who really understand and went through something together,” Polarek said.
She and her family were at Walker Bros. Original Pancake House when the shooting started.
“So we were right there,” she added.
The crowd gathered around the podium set in front of the gray building as a violin quartet played somber string music. Some people swayed. Many stood still. Dozens lingered farther back on the mostly filled lawn where Mayor Nancy Rotering, a poet and local religious leaders spoke, with pauses for Spanish translation.
At about the same time a shooter opened fire on the parade crowd, Rotering led attendees in a moment of silence. The 83 rounds permanently altered hundreds of lives, she said.
“The impact of that one minute is incomprehensible,” she said.
Other speakers praised the community’s resilience and called for action to prevent future gun violence. Rabbi Isaac Serotta of Highland Park’s Makom Solel Lakeside synagogue noted “rampant gun violence” across the country. Dozens of people were shot across Chicago in one recent weekend, he told the crowd.
“Each death and injury opens the sores for us anew and we feel for our community, and for all the communities around our country suffering as we do,” Serotta said.
Throughout the ceremony, Jen Kaufman stood next to her mother. They wrapped their arms around one another as they listened. She had looked for the beauty in the darkness after the shooting, she said.
“And one of the main beautiful things was seeing so many people that I could have, honestly, never seen again,” Kaufman, 22, said. “Getting to see them and hug them and just help support each other, it’s a really beautiful thing. And that’s what makes Highland Park so special.”
Some in the crowd wore the red, white and blue garments typical of the holiday that once called to mind kids, politicians and bands parading through the town’s main street.
But the shooting changed Independence Day’s meaning for Kaufman. Tuesday wasn’t about celebrating America, she said, but celebrating Highland Park.
“It’s a difficult time, but I’m glad to be here trying to take our town back,” said Kaufman, who went to school alongside the alleged shooter. “We’re resilient and proud to be here, and proud to be a part of not letting him take anything from us.”
Neighbors greeted one another happily as they waited to walk. Others reached for knowing hugs. Some stood alone in quiet reflection.
Rob Smoler, 66, wore a shirt emblazoned with a soaring bald eagle and an American flag. The Highland Park native and father said he felt sorry for the kids who wouldn’t be able to celebrate the parade this year. He always went to it growing up, and he hopes the community can return to the once-normal celebration.
“It’s the last thing you can imagine — something like that happening at the biggest community event,” he said.
He reflected on the people killed and wounded, and wondered how someone from the town he knew so well could have opened fire. As he spoke, he fought tears behind his black sunglasses.
“It’s hard to process it. You don’t really realize how affected you were,” he said.
The community walk took the sprawling crowd down Central Avenue along the annual parade’s usual route. Armed police stood atop the city’s buildings. White fences blocked off the sidewalks.
A long, baby blue banner stood over the intersection where most victims were shot last year. “Together. Unidos,” it read. It would have been inappropriate to hold the family-oriented annual parade this year, Rotering told reporters earlier in the day. She described the community walk as an effort to reclaim the space.
“It was important for us to say that evil doesn’t win. And this is our parade route. And this is our community that we are taking back,” Rotering said.
One woman stopped just shy of the banner before passing beneath it, sobbing. A bouquet filled with white lilies sat on the sidewalk outside the Walker Bros restaurant, where several people were killed.
Lauren Cardick pushed a stroller as she walked past the intersection of Second Street and Central Avenue. The 37-year-old said she looked up to see the roof where the shooter was.
The Highland Park resident who wasn’t in town when the shooting happened last year said she felt it was important to attend the memorial services for friends who survived the shooting and didn’t feel comfortable coming out for the anniversary.
“To show that the community is still here and supportive. And that we’re not going to let this beat us, we’re not going to let this take this holiday away,” she said.
Over the last year, the mother of two boys, ages 3 and 5, has worried her sons might not be safe when they walk out of the house. She said she’s doing everything she can to make the world more secure for them.
“Highland Park is not going to let this define us forever,” Cardick added.
Thousands packed the street as they walked down a Central Avenue hill near downtown. Some recalled the high school band members running on the street after gunshots broke out a year ago.
The sidewalks that were once lined with uncountable abandoned lawn chairs were mostly empty. Nearly all who came for the walk participated in it.
Afterward, many gathered for a picnic in Sunset Woods Park. There, amid the upbeat music of a live band, booths with games for kids and food trucks, it almost felt like a normal holiday.
Parents lathered their toddlers in sunscreen, kids downed ice pops and teenagers gorged on hot pretzels. Attendees basked in the bright sun sitting in the outfield of the park’s baseball field. A festival had been set up there one year before but never occurred.
The family of Nicolás Toledo, a grandfather shot and killed in the parade while visiting loved ones from Mexico, gathered in the shade of a tree. They wore shirts and pins honoring the 78-year-old.
The city planned to host a concert featuring Gary Sinise and the Lt. Dan Band later in the day, followed by a drone show in lieu of fireworks.
Later in the afternoon, activists gathered in nearby Jens Jensen Park to demand policy action, including a federal ban on assault weapons.
In front of the small crowd gathered at the park, Dani Cohn, 23, said she remembered jumping to the ground and covering her head after hearing bangs and seeing the “golden rain” of bullets while attending the parade last year.
When she got up, she saw her father’s hands on the face of his cousin, Jacki Sundheim.
Cohn, a trained emergency medical technician, remembered she checked Sundheim’s pulse. There was none. She tried chest compressions, then noticed bleeding. She found her relative’s gunshot wound and tried to pack it, she recalled. A paramedic told her there was nothing left to be done.
“This should not have happened to me. This should not have happened to Jacki. This shouldn’t have happened in Highland Park. This shouldn’t keep happening,” Cohn said.
