Hassan hugged me and whispered in my ear, “One of the people said there is only one more bus coming. I’m praying to God he’s on it.”
Hassan’s brothers had arrived with their children. Some of the younger ones were monitoring social media on their phones, looking for the latest news and updates from friends. A blond woman, one of the volunteers, approached Sibel. “He’s on the next bus, right?” Sibel begged.
The woman nodded. I could see hope returning to Sibel’s face. “Alhamdulillah, Can is coming on the next bus,” she told us.
“Somebody posted on Facebook that Can is injured!” someone shouted. “They said he is alive and in the hospital.”
Hassan and Sibel asked one of the volunteers to take them to the hospital mentioned in the Facebook message. The rest of us, including Can’s brother and grandmother, stayed at the stadium, waiting for news.
I looked at my phone, hoping for a message from my source that would tell me not to worry, that Can was all right, just slightly injured. But there was no message, and my increasingly desperate calls continued to go unanswered. By now, I thought, they probably have a list of the dead. Someone from Caritas told me the police were organizing a press conference.
At about 1:00 a.m., half a dozen plainclothes police came into the hall. They had grim looks on their faces and papers in their hands. They seemed to be bearing news, but they also looked weighted down, as if whatever they carried was heavy. My stomach began to churn. “How many families are you going to talk to?” I overheard one asking another. A blue-eyed officer with dark grayish hair glanced down at the papers and asked one of the volunteers to point out various people. He seemed to be looking for certain families. I walked up to him.
“I’m sorry, but are you one of the police officers from the crisis center?”
“Yes,” he answered.
“We have a family member missing. Please, can you tell us anything?”
He folded the paper he was holding and opened a notebook. “Please give me your name, address, and who is the missing family member.”
My voice shook as I recited the details. “For full disclosure, you should know I am also a journalist working for the Washington Post,” I told him. “But I’m not asking you these questions as a reporter. I’m asking as a member of the family.”
He said he understood and asked me to wait while he spoke to someone on his cell phone. My aunt had come to stand next to me, and I pressed her hand while watching the policeman’s face and trying to read his lips as he spoke softly into the phone a few feet away.
He stared at the ground, and as the conversation continued, he bowed his head further. Finally, he hung up and walked over to us. “Where are Can’s parents?” he asked.
“They went to look for their child in the hospital,” I said.
“Aside from you, are there any other family members here?”
I motioned to my aunt and told him there were others, too. Including family and friends, there were sixteen of us. “Why, do you know anything?”
He looked at me for a few seconds, then leaned closer and whispered, “I think we need to go to a private room.”
“Oh, God, please, no.” The words slipped out, because I knew what going to a private room meant. I felt my knees weaken.
He closed his eyes as if trying to push the moment away. “Please stay calm, gather whoever is here, and let’s all go to another room.”
We were directed down a flight of stairs into a locker room. The police officer with the blue eyes and one of his female colleagues entered through a separate door. I heard them say something about “McDonald’s” and “shooting” and that they’d found a tall, slim young man whose wallet had an ID card with the name Can Leyla.
“This young man wouldn’t have made it into the hospital,” the male police officer said. “I am sorry.”
“What are you saying?” Can’s twenty-one-year-old brother, Ferid, stood up. “You are talking about my brother? Are you saying Can is dead?”
“I am sorry. Your brother is dead.”
“The boy was just fourteen years old,” Ferid said. “How is this possible? There must be a mistake.”
It was only later that I heard the whole story and was able to make sense of it. An eighteen-year-old German-Iranian student named David Sonboly had opened fire at the McDonald’s across from the Olympia shopping center, killing five people inside, including Can. Outside, on Hanauer Strasse, Sonboly shot and killed two pedestrians, then walked to a nearby electronics store, where he shot and killed another person before crossing the street and entering the shopping mall. Moving from the ground floor through the parking garage, he killed one more person and discharged seventeen rounds into a parked vehicle. Shortly after 6:00 p.m., Sonboly was seen on the parking garage rooftop, where a man living in a neighboring apartment building yelled at him. At least two bystanders filmed this episode on their phones. The police shot at Sonboly, causing him to run through a grassy area leading onto Henckystrasse, where he hid in the stairwell of an apartment building. When he stepped out, the police confronted him, and Sonboly shot himself in the head.
The whole thing took several hours. When it was done, ten people were dead, most between fourteen and twenty years old; the exception was a forty-five-year-old Turkish mother of two. Although many were German citizens, all were of foreign descent: Turkish, Romanian, Hungarian, or Kosovan. Thirty-six others were injured, ten seriously.
The locker room filled with screaming. “Oh, my God, how can we tell his parents?” my aunt cried. “They won’t survive this.” We were both weeping. I had no idea how or what to tell them. It was unthinkable.
The police officer walked over to me. “I need to ask you to call the parents and tell them to come back, but you must stay calm. I don’t want them to hear about this until we have them in a safe place.”
I was in tears and shaking. But my pain doesn’t matter, I thought. We had to do what we could to help Can’s parents and brother. “I will try,” I answered in a broken voice. I went upstairs, where it was quieter, and dialed Hassan’s phone. He picked up after two rings.
“Yes, Souad?”
“Hassan? Where are you?” I tried to keep my voice even.
“On the bus. We wanted to go to another hospital and look for Can.”
“No, please can you and Sibel come back here? The police just came, and they want to speak to the families.”
“The police? Do they want to speak to us alone?”
I knew I had to speak carefully. I didn’t want them to figure out what happened while they were out in the city, away from the rest of the family. “No, no, they want to speak to families in general, make some announcements,” I lied. “But they are waiting until everybody is here so they don’t have to say it twice.”
To calm myself, I made a fist, clenching my thumb between the other fingers. A police officer standing nearby laid her hand on my shoulder.