Memories, pain remain fresh 5 years after Pratt warehouse mass shooting in Illinois

CHICAGO — Thursday is the fifth anniversary of a day in Aurora that is difficult to remember, and impossible to forget.

Shortly after 1 p.m. on Feb. 15, 2019, a disgruntled employee upset over a disciplinary hearing opened fire on people in the hearing at the Henry Pratt Co. warehouse on the near West Side, killing four of them – Russell Beyer, Clayton Parks, Josh Pinkard and Trevor Wehner, according to officials.

After leaving the room, the employee shot and killed Vicente Juarez, who was on the loading dock, officials said. He shot a sixth employee who survived, and then the shooter took off into the warehouse where he would be chased and confronted and eventually killed during an exchange of gunfire with police, according to reports.

Five Aurora police officers – John Cebulski, Marco Gomez, James Zegar, Adam Miller and Reynaldo Rivera – were shot and injured that day. While three of them have retired, two of them remain on active duty.

More than 42 agencies responded to the shooting, although the exact number of officers was unknown.

A Federal Emergency Management Agency report done months after the incident praised the Aurora Police Department for its response to the mass shooting, but also noted communication and other issues could have been improved in the event of another similar incident.

The report described the response to the attack as a collaboration of responding agencies that helped prevent more deaths.

Aurora has spent the past five years updating police equipment and training to address many of the issues brought forth that day.

But no amount of equipment, training or reports can stop the memories of that tragic event. And for those involved, from victims’ families to first responders, the incident left an indelible mark on their lives.

A father’s grief

Although five years have passed since the day his son was gunned down in a termination meeting by the Henry Pratt employee he had been trying to help, Ted Beyer insists little has changed.

Certainly the anger and bitterness he harbored from the moment he heard his son was among the dead is still there.

His ire is not directed just at the shooter who killed union shop chairman Russell Beyer and four other co-workers, but at the way he said the company treated its employees.

And yes, five years after their deaths on that cold February day, Ted Beyer still visits his son’s grave daily.

Sometimes the 75-year-old Bristol man goes twice – once in the early morning and again in the afternoon.

He’s even been known to make a third trip in the evening to Mount Olivet Catholic Cemetery in Aurora, about eight miles from his home and where other family members are buried, including a sister who died days before Russ’ murder.

These visits are a grieving father’s way of honoring his son, which include making sure Russ’ final resting place “gets the respect he deserves.”

Vandals have been a problem, said Beyer. The eagle that sat atop a wreath went missing, and about a month ago, the yellow model Mustang that was attached to the headstone also disappeared.

Plus, he wants to keep Russ’ grave trimmed and as tidy as possible.

“I had that boy when I got back from ‘Nam,” he said. “He is what helped keep me together.”

Father and son were close, with Russ even following his dad’s career path at Pratt, where Ted worked for four decades and was also a union leader.

Ted got Russ involved in the union, and it was his son’s “giant heart” that put him in the fatal meeting that tragic afternoon.

Guilt? Yes, Ted Beyer still carries that, as well.

“We talked every night,” he replied when asked about it. “I should have been there for him.”

Everyone grieves differently, of course, and Beyer understands some believe he’s walking his path alone.

But he remains unapologetic about the anger he feels.

And he wants one thing made clear.

This five-year anniversary is not just about his son, Russ, who would have turned 48 the day before his funeral. It’s also about the other innocent people who went to work one day and did not make it home to their loved ones at the end of it.

“A lot of good people,” Beyer said, “did not need to die that day.”

Wounded police officer remembers

Aurora Police Sgt. Marco Gomez will likely not be present Thursday evening when the city gathers for a remembrance vigil for the fifth anniversary of the mass shooting that thrust Aurora into a national spotlight no place wants to be.

Gomez was the most seriously wounded of the five officers shot while responding to the call that left five Henry Pratt employees dead and a community reeling from an act of senseless gun violence.

But as the Community Oriented Policing officer lay fighting for his life after being rushed to AMITA (now Ascension) Mercy medical center, one of the thoughts that raced through his mind kept him focused on the fight to stay alive.

Gomez wanted to survive to see his two boys play hockey.

On Thursday evening, at about the same time the city will come together in remembrance, Gomez’s now 10-year-old eldest son Marco Jr. will be stepping onto the ice for his team’s first state playoff game.

And you bet Dad will be there to cheer “Buddy” on.

Gomez not only wants to be in the arena at All Seasons Ice Rinks in Naperville, he’s asked some other officers, including those who helped save his life five years ago, to be present when the young athlete skates onto the ice.

“He’s never met them,” said Gomez. “But I didn’t realize how much that day impacted him until later. I want my son to know that his dad will always have people there to take care of him.”

With the retirement of John Cebuslki, Jim Zegar and Reynaldo Rivera, Gomez notes that he and Adam Miller, who was only 24 when he was shot in the face on Feb. 15, 2019, are the only two of the wounded officers still working with the Aurora Police Department.

Despite losing sight in one eye, Miller not only continued his career as a police officer, he is now a detective with the gang unit, which Gomez describes as an accomplishment that required “rigorous” training and extraordinary perseverance.

As for Gomez, after working patrol since joining the APD in 2005, last year he made the decision to take “a desk job” and now is a liaison between the police and the city for security at special events.

Leaving patrol was “bittersweet,” he admitted. It was a good career move personally. And wife Carly certainly did not object to her husband getting off the streets, especially after going through those anxious hours in a hospital waiting room, as blood was being pumped into him as fast as it was going out.

The ex-Marine is already carrying shrapnel in his right leg from one of his two tours in Iraq, and his left leg still contains the bullet from the mass shooting at Pratt that tore through his femoral artery and almost cost him his life.

But Gomez calls himself “a street cop at heart.” And if a call ever goes out there is an active shooter somewhere, ”I will be the first one out the door.”

Gomez will also be the first to pay tribute to the other officers who went into the Pratt building and took out the gunman to prevent further loss of life. But most especially he wants attention on this anniversary to be directed toward the five Pratt employees who were not so lucky.

Their names, he said, are never far from his thoughts, no matter how many years pass: Russell Beyer, Vicente Juarez, Clayton Parks, Josh Pinkard and Trevor Wehner.

“We live in such a busy world,” he said. “But this is important. We do not want to forget the victims.”

Being ready for the unexpected

With 40 years of nursing experience, most of it in emergency rooms, Karen Feiden, trauma coordinator for Ascension Mercy medical center in Aurora, certainly had the experience to handle the chaos on Feb. 15, 2019.

It was actually a call from her young adult daughter who saw social media posts about the Henry Pratt shooting that first alerted her to the fact that day would be far from ordinary.

When working in a designated trauma center, it is almost always busy and you “have to be ready for the unexpected to run through the door,” Feiden noted.

Luckily, it had been fairly quiet when Mercy did get the alert, so “we were able to get things somewhat organized” before the ambulances began arriving.

Still “you are very much taken aback that this is happening in your community,” she said.

“It’s not uncommon to have a couple of major patients at the same time. We can absorb that,” Feiden continued. “But there was a lot of tension: How many more will there be?”

And that question was not answered until word came much later that Aurora police had swept the entire Pratt facility and the incident was over.

Looking back five years later, Feiden praises the entire staff for how each one handled the afternoon. But she also acknowledged its lasting impact because “certain patients, certain situations will leave a mark … and this was one of them.”

Yes, it could have been a far worse tragedy. But that was not the case for those who loved Russell Beyer, Vicente Juarez, Clayton Parks, Josh Pinkard and Trevor Wehner.

“My prayers go out to their families on this day,” said Feiden. “I hope they are able to find some sort of peace moving forward.”

‘They knew what needed to be done’

What EMS Division Chief Jason Demas of the Aurora Fire Department remembers most about the day of the mass shooting at Pratt was how proud he was of the firefighters who charged into danger without hesitation.

As one of the first to arrive on the scene, Demas would write down the names of the firefighters as they went into the building so he had a record of who went where. Unlike police officers, the firefighters did not carry weapons and had not yet received bulletproof vests.

“As I stood there at the forward command post, I watched teams of Aurora firefighters that have never done this before. It’s out of our norm,” he said. “They went with no reservations. They might have had them mentally or internally, but they just went to work.”

Because of a grant the fire department received, firefighters had been training for almost two years on rescue task force teams, which are designed to be a response to an active shooter, according to Demas.

He said these teams search for victims of the shooting and attempt to rescue them in the “warm zone,” which is away from where the police are chasing the shooter but an area that has still not been fully cleared.

Aurora Fire Chief David McCabe said that, before the shooting, many who attended the training did not see its value. McCabe was the division chief of training when the rescue task force training began.

“There were people at every training going, ‘I don’t think we should be doing this,’” he said. “But the day it happened, not one person said, ‘I’m not going in.’ Not one person was hiding behind a truck or standing a block away. Every single person was ready to go in. They knew what needed to be done.”

The fire department saw an outpouring of support after the mass shooting not seen since the 9/11 terrorist attacks, but McCabe said the firefighters did not act like they did anything special.

“Our firefighters, they got thank you cards, they got cookies brought to the station, but every single one of them will tell you, ‘I was just doing my job,’” he said.

An emotional rollercoaster

Aurora Police Chief Keith Cross, then a commander with the department, said the day of the mass shooting was an “emotional rollercoaster.”

Throughout the day, he felt the adrenaline of rushing former Police Chief Kristen Ziman and Cmdr. Jack Fickler to the scene, but then had to try to calm down once he got there so that he could get responding officers the resources they needed to deal with the situation. Finally, he helped notify victims’ families of the tragedy and met with injured police officers in the hospital.

Cross said he experienced tunnel vision, something police officers are trained to deal with, for the first time in his career on his drive to the scene.

“I remember driving down Lake Street faster than I’ve ever driven before. I was in the 90s,” he said. “I remember listening to the radio and hearing our officers saying, ‘I’ve been hit. I’ve been shot.’”

At the end of the day, after a visit with a wounded police officer, Cross said he found himself in the Park Ridge Lutheran General Hospital parking lot around 2 a.m., just sitting in his car trying to process everything he went through.

“As police officers, we deal with a lot of things, and we normally are able to just go and deal with some pretty terrible things and, you know, we’ve got a job to do,” he said. “It’s not that we’re not empathetic, because we are, but you’re able to process at least what happened. That day, I had trouble.”

His overwhelming feeling was that of confusion, he said. He wondered how something like this could happen and tried to process all the different emotions he felt throughout the day.

“Then, that long drive home from Park Ridge was just me and my thoughts,” Cross said. “It was weird. It was eerie. I can’t describe it any other way.”

The day after, Cross and others from the police department met with the victims’ families, which he said might have been the most difficult part of the whole situation. He still remembers that meeting like it was yesterday, he said.

“My heart just goes out to the families of the victims,” Cross said. “I continue to pray for them and their healing. I know it’s tough, especially around this time of year, it’s very difficult for them, but I just want them to know that the men and women of the Aurora Police Department will always remember them and their loved ones.”

An afternoon that seemed like an eternity

When the call came from a Holy Angels parent, who also happened to be a Kane County sheriff’s deputy, that the Catholic elementary school must go to a “hard lockdown NOW,” Principal Tonya Forbes had no time to ask questions, no time to panic and in fact does not even remember taking the time to breathe.

The school had just recently finished “active shooter response” training, but the focus of that education was getting the students out of the building, not keeping them inside.

No one knew what was going on, just that it was imperative all doors remain locked, window shades pulled and kids kept as quiet as possible inside each classroom.

“The truth is, we never think it is going to happen here,” said Forbes. “We all live a charmed life … and bad things happen to other people.”

Holy Angels lost that naivety on the afternoon of Feb. 15, 2019.

During the lockdown at this school just yards from the mass shooting at the Pratt warehouse, the younger kids were told it was “angry squirrels outside” to explain the reason they could not venture outdoors.

Teachers could hear helicopters flying overhead and peek out to see swarms of police cars, SWAT teams, even a sniper on the roof of the nearby food pantry.

“We were getting updates … on the news … from parents … the phone was ringing off the hook … it was all so surreal,” recalled Forbes.

It took a while for the principal to even remember her own husband Rick was an employee of Henry Pratt, which led to a frantic string of unanswered phone calls that went on until she also remembered he’d taken the day off from work.

But others continued to be caught up in very personal and very scary unknowns as the drama played out next door, like then-eighth-grader Justin Cebulski, whose mother called to let him know his father, John, a 31-year APD veteran and one of the wounded officers, was at the hospital but OK and that his sister would pick him up after the kids could be released and take him to see his dad.

While the students were finally released four hours later to nervous but relieved parents, the afternoon “that seemed like eternity” forever changed those who were there, insisted Forbes.

By the time the last student was gone, Forbes remembers meeting her husband and oldest daughter in the school lobby, where she was embraced by hugs and broke down sobbing.

“We all got to go home,” she said. “But it was a horrible weekend” as they awaited the names of those who did not get to be with their families again.

Much has changed since.

For one thing Officer Cebulski, who was shot in the knee while searching the second floor of the Pratt warehouse, is indeed OK and retired from the Aurora Police Department. Son Justin is now a cadet with the department, and according to reports from other officers, doing great.

Forbes’ husband, Rick, still works as a draftsman, but does so from home for the parent company Mueller Water Products, since Pratt closed down the two buildings on Highland Avenue and moved all the jobs to Tennessee.

And the school, which could only rely on emails and an outdated PA system to communicate that day, has upgraded its internal and external communication systems.

One thing that’s not changed, however, is the sadness Forbes feels.

This fifth anniversary has hit especially hard.

“Holy Angels will always be tied to this tragedy. For every staff member here, it will remain etched deeply in our minds,” she said, noting that some teachers still “get the chills” when they come across the movie they played that afternoon “angry squirrels” were outside their school.

“My thoughts are with the families of the victims. I know some of them had children the same ages as those in this building,” she said.

“Five years is a long time. And while life goes on for most of us, for those who lost a loved one on that day, that moment in time changes everything.”

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