SAN JOSE — On Friday afternoon, Kary Marin sat on a rock 50 feet from a memorial erected in front of San Jose City Hall for the transit workers killed by a gunman Wednesday. Her eyes nearly closed with sweat from the afternoon sun on her brow, she said she was praying.
The gunman’s rampage killed nine people, all of whom worked for the Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority. It was one of 10 mass shootings — where four or more people are shot — in the U.S. last week, according to the nonprofit Gun Violence Archive.
Ten in one week.
In 2021, there have been 234 mass shootings in the U.S., including in Indianapolis; Shreveport, Louisiana; Boulder, Colorado; Orange, California; Bryan, Texas; and Atlanta.
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Marin, 53, doesn’t drive. She takes VTA buses and light rail everywhere she needs to go from her home in the nearby Japantown neighborhood. She feels connected to the drivers she spends time with every day. As she has ridden the bus in the past two days, she said she can feel the weight of mourning.
It’s the same feeling she has sitting here at City Hall, one day after an evening vigil for those killed drew more than 1,000 people.
“I can feel it on the bus, the sadness of the drivers,” she said. “People are processing.”
She is, too. How to make sense of nine people, just going to work, and not coming home?
“They just came to work. To work, and they are gone,” she said. “How are you going to explain it? How do you accept this?”
She sees strength in the drivers who are carrying on by continuing to carry people — literally.
“I tell them, ‘Thank you for your driving and my heart goes out to you,’” she said.
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Erica Miranda gingerly steps onto the platform where hundreds of flowers and scores of candles flank the photographs and signs honoring the nine men who were killed. She, like Marin, is a regular VTA bus rider. When the names and photographs of the victims were released, she saw the face of a man who had once been one of her regular drivers: Adrian Balleza. He had moved from buses to being a light rail operator, she said, but he still waved to her at stops.
“I saw the news, I saw the picture and it’s him. Oh my god, it’s him.”
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Marin has been sober for 17 months. Without the drugs she relied on for decades, she can finally feel things, she said. She is no longer hiding from the world.
“I had feelings before that I covered up. I’m feeling today.”
She has embraced God in her sobriety. She considers herself spiritual. But the killing of nine innocent people and the hundreds of mass shootings in the U.S. this year is raising questions about God and faith.
But if she asks the questions, about gun violence and about our seeming inability to address a national scourge, what will that mean for her own faith, the one that has guided her new life without drugs?
“I’m questioning: What is this?’” she said. “I don’t want to beat myself up for doing that.”
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Steve Ballinger is a pastor with the Billy Graham Rapid Response Team of chaplains. He and a handful of others wearing blue Billy Graham polo shirts stand in the plaza Friday, ready to offer counsel. I ask him what he would say to a woman like Marin, who wonders how her God could allow yet another mass shooting. He said it’s not for him to know: “Why would God allow that if God is so loving and so powerful and kind and whatnot? How do you reconcile that? I don’t know, other than I walk by faith.”
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When Marin kicked drugs, she opened the door to feeling the world, seeing it as it is. She insists it’s beautiful, worth living with her whole, clean self.
“I see things in life now,” she said. “There are a lot of beautiful people in the world.”
She’s speaking of the victims, but I ask her about the shooter, who took his own life after the bloody rampage. How can she see beauty today, with the pictures of nine victims on display across the plaza?
“There are no mistakes in this God’s world,” she said. “But what is this? Is this what God wanted to happen? I just can’t question anymore, so I pray.”
I ask her what she says in her prayers. She says she is sending peace — to anyone who feels afflicted.
“It’s healing. When I speak to someone about it, it’s hard, but it’s healing,” she said.
But sometimes it feels too hard. As she speaks, she occasionally drops her head into her hands and goes quiet.
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One block south of the City Hall plaza, newly minted San Jose State graduates, wearing black gowns and dress shoes, wander the streets. Some carry bouquets of flowers that look similar to the scores of bouquets left at the makeshift memorial.
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