Interview with Sandy Phillips

Jessi Redfield Ghawi was a half hour into the midnight premier of “The Dark Night Rises,” when James Holmes, a graduate student clad in head-to-toe bullet proof armor, stormed through the cinema’s emergency exit door, chucked tear gas into the theater and sprayed bullets from a Glock pistol, a Remington tactical shotgun and an AR-15 assault rifle. The attack killed 12 and killed 70 others.

Ghawi was among the dead, shot six times. She was 24.

I spoke with Sandy Phillips, Ghawi’s mother, who has since become a national gun reform activist, traveling in a used camper with her husband, Lonnie, to connect a vast survivor and victims network. 

She fields frequent media requests and advocates for “No Notoriety” coverage to stem the tide of so-called “copy-cat” crimes. She joined me by phone before a speaking engagement in New York, one of few trips where the camper stayed behind.

The following transcript has been edited lightly for clarity and brevity.

I wonder if you could take me back to the beginning and tell me a little about Jessi. She seemed like such a bright young lady.

She was. She was our world. She was so much fun from the very beginning. Even as a baby, she was fun. She wanted to play and get out. I’ll give you a little story here. When I went to the doctor to find out I was pregnant, it was April Fool’s Day and he was teasing me about it being April Fool’s Day, and I said, ‘You’re joking, right?’ Because my son was only 7 or 8 months old at the time. He said, ‘I’m not laughing. You are indeed pregnant.’ And she was probably conceived on or around Valentine’s Day and she’ll be born on Thanksgiving Day, if I carry to term, that’s my due date.

She loved practical jokes and joking around and having fun and making fun of people, in a good way, not the bad way. And then I went into labor on Thanksgiving Day. I was very thankful to have her and didn’t have her long enough. She was a real wordsmith. She could take a line and run with it.

Could take me back to the early days, when you learned about this event, and what the early stages are in dealing with something like this?

For us it was probably a little different quite frankly because Jessi was in the media [she blogged about the National Hockey League], so we were treated with kid gloves and the people that came to the house that were in the media were also friends, not that they didn’t need a story or want a story, but they came at it from a different angle, because they lost one of their own. That was a little different. But I do know that other people had trucks parked in their front yards and people knocking at their front doors and people calling and we did too, but it was done pretty respectfully with the exception of a couple, where you just say, ‘Excuse me. This is my private mourning time and you’re not a part of that, so leave me alone.’ I think timing and approach are extremely important and what you’re motive is.

I think if you can go to somebody especially in a mass shooting situation and say, ‘We’re trying to capture the story of each one of the victims and downplay the killer,’ because people want to understand, how does this happen? How does this happen? Well, it happens because we have such lax gun laws in this country and anybody can get their hands on a gun. That’s how it happens. So it’s not so much about mental illness, though that is a part of it, but the overall reason it happens and in our case the killer even admitted and took joy in telling the fact that he chose a mass shooting because it was the easiest way to do it, because you can get anything you want on the internet or out of a trunk if you can’t legally buy. He was able to legally buy 4,000 round of ammunition with the click of a mouse on the internet without so much as getting his drivers license or verifying that the address on his credit card was correct. We need a national law to close the loopholes and make sure this doesn’t continue to happen as it currently is, as we all know.

I learned that you or your husband were gun owners or are gun owners. How you do hold those two ideas in both your hands and say, ‘Yeah, I do have a right to own a gun and I’m going to exercise that right?’

It’s very easy to hold both those thoughts because they’ve always been my thoughts. I was raised with a mother and father in California that were hunters and shot, skeet and trapped, so I almost grew up in a shooting range. There was clubhouse there and the kids always hung out there until they too started shooting and participating in skeet and trap and hunting.

But my father was always one to say, ‘A gun is a lethal weapon. It’s designed for one thing and one thing only and that’s to kill. So you never intimidate with it. You always make sure it’s unloaded. You break the gun down. You don’t carry in public. You don’t, you don’t, you don’t, you don’t, you don’t.’ That’s the way I was raised. The right to own a gun was a privilege to own a gun and to use it as it was made to be used: To hunt, perhaps to defend yourself, although that seldom is necessary in this country, though you’d think it was.

It’s never been a conflict for me, in fact it’s just been logical to me. So when I hear these other statements that are so bizarre to me, and if you take the logic and carry it forward, they don’t make any sense. So to me, the Second Amendment is a right and also a privilege and it’s one that has to be taken very, very seriously, because it’s the one thing, the one product in America, whose sole purpose is to kill.

Sadly, events like these have become, I don’t want to say relatively frequent, but they’ve become more common.

They are more frequent. They are at least three a week that aren’t covered by the media. Unless there’s a bunch of people killed, usually eight or more, they don’t even cover it. If it’s a family dispute and five people are killed including the killer, they don’t even bother to cover it most of the time, anymore.

With the shootings that had come before Aurora, what was your reaction to them?

You have to remember, I was born in1950. I saw Kennedy assassinated. I saw Bobby Kennedy assassinated. I saw Martin Luther King, Malcolm X. I saw it all. I remember having conversations with my father about that, about why is this happening, how could this be happening, this shouldn’t be happening. And basically what he said was, ‘You don’t know a good guy with a gun from a bad guy with a gun. There are bad people that own guns and these things shouldn’t happen.’

I remember thinking then that there’s something very wrong for this to be happening. And then of course when Columbine happened, I had very small children and I was one of those people in front of the TV saying, ‘Something needs to be done. Someone needs to do something,’ and thinking that of course it was being taken care of by our leaders. Of course what we found out when ours happened and with Virginia Tech that, no, people aren’t doing the right thing and people aren’t standing up to the gun lobby. The coverage sometimes with the media doesn’t dig deep enough.

One of the first questions that needs to be asked in any shooting, not just a mass shooting, is ‘Where did the gun come from and how is that possible to be able to accumulate when obviously in our case this young man was not well and what changes need to be made so that this doesn’t continue to happen?’ And that very seldom gets asked. Very seldom. To me the first question should always be, ‘Where did the gun and ammunition come from?’

In the immediate aftermath of one of these events, there are some people who will say, ‘Don’t approach, don’t touch the issue of guns in America. Learn about the victims. Learn about the lives that were taken and the circumstances.’ And then I’ve heard other people say, like you just did, ‘The first question has to be, how did this person get their hands on a firearm or on this kind of ammunition.’ And I wonder what your stance is on that. Obviously, there’s different questions for different people, but if you something happened a week from now and the first news article you saw was, how did XY shooter get a gun —

I’d be applauding. I’d be applauding because it’s so seldom asked. Attention immediately goes to the killer and why did he do this? That answer is a very simple one: it’s the ease of being able to get your hands on a gun in America. It’s a very low number of Americans that actually own guns, but they own many. So when you have a flood of weapons on the streets or owned by Americans, you need to be asking, ‘What is it with our culture that this continues to happen so easily?’ And we need to address it. So I would be applauding, because this needs to be asked. They go directly to the sensational side, which of course, makes people afraid, so what do they do, they get scared and go out and buy guns, instead of saying, ‘Wait a second. What is wrong here? Why is it so easy to get your hands on a gun? Why is it that the (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) is preventing psychologists and psychiatrists from doing their jobs easily and fully and saying, this person that this person has just told me that he wants to kill a bunch of people and immediately enter him into the system so he can’t be able to buy a gun legally.’ Slow him down, at least. If nothing else, slow this process down so maybe that person has a chance to get the help they need or think it through a little more before they take that action.

With this idea of asking that question of ‘How did this person get the gun?’ or ‘How did this person get the ammunition?’ how does that jive with you with the idea of No Notoriety? In the aftermath of these events we want to focus on the victims and the communities that are uniting to try to make each other whole again, but at the same time we have to ask these tough questions about how did so-and-so obtain a firearm.

As long as you’re not using that person’s name and likeness in every single article, No Notoriety states that in the opening line, in the opening paragraph, you can use the person’s name. We ask that you don’t use a picture because once everybody knows who it is and they’ve seen the picture, you don’t need to keep showing it. You establish who and from that point on, you use other adjectives or descriptors to talk about him. ‘The accused,’ ‘the shooter,’ ‘the perpetrator,’ whatever other words you want to use, but you don’t need to be naming him over and over and over and over again. It gets real old real quick and journalists have been doing a great job recently.

I’ve asked people, ‘Can you tell me the last mass shooter’s name?’ and they can’t. And then we talk about Allison Parker who was killed on air in Virginia, and we talk about her shooting, ‘Do you remember his name?’ No. The only one that they remember clearly, and I don’t use their names, are our killer and the killer at Sandy Hook. The rest of them fade to black because we’ve been pushing so hard on don’t make these people famous. Hopefully it will continue to work.

In the early days of this event, as you’re getting that media attention, what were the approaches that were most successful with you and your family? What works?

What works was them wanting to tell Jessi’s story, them wanting to tell who she was and not about how she died. But who she was. What her dreams were. What here hopes were. What she was doing in her life. What kind of person she was. That’s what worked for us, somebody wanting to tell Jessi’s story and not talk about the killer.

As you’ve connected with other communities going through similar tragedies, has that been consistent?

Pretty much. They’re in shock. They can’t believe their loved on is gone and they want people to know who that person was so they can miss them too. I’ve had a lot of people say to me, they knew of Jessi. They had read some of her stuff and when they found out it was Jessi who was killed it was like, ‘Oh no, she can’t be gone because she has so much to give yet.’ That always very sad, but it also made me feel very good that it made such a difference in such a short amount of time here on Earth.

She was just extraordinary for somebody so young. She really was. And when somebody says, I want to tell that story, any parent knows, I want people to know that story. I want people to know who my baby was.

At what point does that get overwhelming to be asked that question however many times?

Immediately and forever. I still stumble when people say, ‘Tell me about your daughter,’ because I remember her laugh. I remember how she would come into the room, and if I was on the phone, she would say, ‘Pay attention to me. Pay attention to me. Pay attention to me,’ while I was on the phone. Or it would be, ‘Mom, mom, mom,’ like Stewy on Family Guy. She’d just keep at it and being funny until it overwhelmed you because your first reaction would be, let me concentrate I’m on the telephone, but pretty soon you’d be laughing along with her. That’s just the way she was. I tell these stories and I’m living that again and then remembering I can never live that again. It never gets easy. Mourning is not something that has an expiration date. It has a start date, but it doesn’t have an expiration date. And some days are good and some days are horrid and you just get through.

Maybe you’re on a flight and you’re chatting with the person next to you and somebody says, ‘How many kids do you have?’ What’s the response to that question?

I’m not uncomfortable telling what happened to my daughter. And if somebody hearing it is, then that’s the start perhaps of another conversation. Their discomfort is not about me. It’s about them. They own it. I don’t. They ask a question. I’m honest with them.

Every now and then if I hear something on a plane, there was one trip that my husband and I were taking and there was a guy sitting a couple rows behind me a loud and he was talking about guns and he was talking about how one of these gun manufacturers was going to leave Denver because they changed all these laws and I’m just sitting here hearing it, and at the end of the flight I stood up and said ‘How old are you?’ He was the same age as Jessi would have been. And I said, ‘How would your parents like to get a phone call telling them that you had been shot six times with military grade ammunition and that one of them had gone through your face and blown a five-inch hole through your head? How do you think they’d like hearing about it? Do you think that they’d really care that this gun manufacturer is pulling out of Denver?’

I’m not beyond shaming someone.

When did you decide that you wanted to become more of an activist about guns? Sadly, tragedies like this happen to way too many families and not too many of these families decide that they want to become national activists.

My husband and I the day that Jessi was killed and before people started pouring in, we were in the living room of our home and I was sitting on the couch and Lonnie was looking out of the sliding glass door out into the garden, and I said, ‘You know we’re going to get involved with this, don’t you?’ And he shook his head up and down and he said, ‘Yeah, I do, but we have to mourn first.’

And it wasn’t a month later that we were already involved, then Newtown happened and it’s been nonstop ever since. And we’re grateful for it. We’re grateful to have the voice and we’re grateful to point out to people that what you think you know as we did as gun owners, what we thought we knew, was all a lie. When you dig deeper and you find out what’s happened in this country when it comes to guns and gun laws, it’s really a very ugly underbelly of our society that’s controlling way too much of our lives.

It’s not like we jumped into it and said, ‘Hey I want to be a national activist.’ It was just something that compelled us because this can’t keep happening. I sure don’t want another mom to be walking in my shoes, and yet there are 90 a day almost that do. I just can’t imagine not doing what we’re doing.

Have you been encouraged with the kind of response you’ve gotten? I know you’ve traveled a bit with (former Maryland) Gov. Martin O’Malley (D) and gun violence has become a major plank of the Democratic platform.

Isn’t that amazing? Isn’t that absolutely amazing? In 2012, we couldn’t get anyone to even say, ‘gun reform,’ or ‘gun violence.’ You couldn’t get either candidate, Obama or Romney, to talk about it. And now it’s part of the platform. It’s amazing to me. I’m thrilled. And I’ll always be very grateful to Gov. O’Malley for making that part of the platform and pushing Hillary to talk more about it. Now she’s all about repealing (federal laws that shield gun makers and sellers from liability if their products are used in a shooting) and putting in some good gun laws. And Bernie, who flip flops on a daily basis, I don’t trust him at all.

But at least they’re talking about it and at least people are beginning to get educated about it. I think for far too long people’s first reaction has always been, ‘Oh they’re coming for our guns.’ Well that’s not true. We have to get to the point where we’re regulating on a national level where we don’t have this gun trafficking situation going on that we do from Indiana to Chicago and up the Iron Pipeline from Florida all the way up to Toronto. We have to get our hands around this issue or we’re going to have anarchy in our country.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but you and Lonnie lived in a camper for some time, correct?

We still do!

Can you tell me the impetus of that?

I wanted very much to be at the trial in Colorado and we lived in San Antonio. So we sold everything except our home. We sold all our furniture, all our belongings, rented the house out.

We bought a camper, a used one at that. Didn’t even buy a new one. We bought a used camper and a truck, a used truck, and we moved to Denver in our camper and attended the trial every day and after the trial was over, we said, ‘What we need to do now is go on the road now in our camper from city to city to city and meet with as many victims and survivors as we can as we travel and make sure that everybody is on the same page.’ And by that I mean, if there is a gun law that’s going on in Colorado and people are testifying on that in Colorado, that somebody maybe in Michigan that’s trying to defend the same law can use the same kind of testimony, so we’re not having to recreate the wheel.

A lot of what we do now is we connect the dots and we connect people to people and other activists. A big one for us is suicide, because it’s so hard for people who lost someone to suicide to talk about it, because there is such shame attached to it still. So if I meet someone in Arizona who is saying, ‘I lost my child, or husband or my daughter to suicide,’ I can connect them to other people who have a similar story, but they’re activists and they’re doing something about it. So they can start developing their own little grass roots that way.

What will happen in America and how this will get changed is through the grass roots effort. So our task is just to make introductions and to tell people our story and to get them interested in taking action and get things done because they’re not doing it at the national level.

Is that a happy existence? Is it joyful? 

I think we’re at the point in our grief that we live a life of gratitude for the people that we’re meeting, for the stories that we’re hearing, for the people that we’re getting to know and love. Our victim and survivor network has really become family and I think you would have a lot of other people who would say the same thing. Great relationships are formed. We know that we’re all working toward the same cause. We know that we all have the same heartbreak and there’s no words that need to be said. It’s an understanding of the heart that you don’t find anywhere else.

So yes, we do have a life of joy. We do have a life of gratitude, but it’s always in the peripheral view that what we’re experiencing and what we’re getting to do came at the highest price anyone would have to pay.