Lucia Dare, Will Kaeger’s wife, was also in the theater the day of the shootings. She majored in sports medicine at Lancaster and is now a physical therapist.
Lucia Dare: It’s interesting. The semester before, I had been in Boston, taking an EMT training course. I thought it was something I wanted to pursue. But turns out I didn’t have the psyche for it. And yet the day of the shooting, I was in the thick of it, applying what I learned in the course to my best friend who’d been shot. With my boyfriend over there who’d also been shot. This was happening in my school, to people I love. I should have been a basket case. But I was numb. I was just…
Alto: You were incredible, Luck. Come on. People would have died if you hadn’t been there.
Jones: David Alto, now 32, is in remission from kidney cancer. He’s watching today’s rehearsal from the auditorium, wearing a black wool cap over his bald head. Lucky Dare sits next to him, holding his hand as they relive those difficult memories Alto: I was trying to help Daisy but Lucky pushed me aside. “Get out of the way.” And she was just yelling things at Fish. I mean, Erik Fiskare. We called him Fish.
Dare: I was calm with Will but I nearly broke down when I saw Daisy’s wound. And Erik [laughter]—oh my God—he was leaning on her femoral pressure point and with his other elbow he just whacks me in the side. You know, like you’d slap a hysterical person. “Get it together.” Or something. It worked. My hands just took over and then I was a robot. Like I could feel my brain severing the emotional connections I had to these people. Crazy what happens to you in a crisis.
Alto: The blood was everywhere. Jesus. For a long time afterward I had a really, really hard time with blood. Like if I was flossing my teeth and spit blood in the sink?
Dare: You flossed? I didn’t floss for a year.
Alto: Post Traumatic Floss Disorder … [Laughter]
Jones: Despite their joking, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, PTSD, was no laughing matter. For many of those in the theater on April 19th, the psychological wounds of the ordeal took longer to heal than the physical ones.
Bianco: Oh, I was a mess.
Jones: Wrapped in a black shawl, Daisy Bianco sits in one of the orchestra seats. She’s joined by John Quillis, who is also performing at tomorrow’s ceremony. He was a sophomore in 1992, and watched the shootings from the stage right wing. He and Daisy were good friends at school, and then started dating a few years after graduation.
John Quillis: I ran into her randomly in New York. We were both going to a master class or something. I didn’t recognize her at first.
Bianco: I looked like crap. I think I weighed 90 pounds.
Quillis: If that. I knew right away she was still haunted by it all. I think I knew because… Well, look, I’m the son of two psychologists. They had me immediately in therapy after the shooting. I think I was one of the few who went to counseling.
Bianco: You were.
Quillis: But even so, it was a long process. When I met up with Daisy I was coming out the other side. She looked like she was just heading into the tunnel.
Bianco: Avoiding the tunnel. I knew I was mentally unraveling after the shooting, but having the goal of physical recovery kept me slightly distracted. Not to say the physical injuries weren’t devastating.
Quillis: Her scars are crazy.
Bianco: Being shot nearly destroyed me. Destroyed the essence of me. I’m a dancer. This is all I’ve done, all I’ve been since I was five. And then I wake up in a hospital bed with my leg shot up and sliced open and I had no idea what had happened. The randomness, the senselessness of it… I truly became two people afterward. There was the me who worked like hell, trained and fought and never looked back. And then there was this other me who was just…dark. Angry and depressed and constantly anxious. Things I had never been before. Feelings I had never entertained, let alone been consumed by. I didn’t know how to express them. A lot of times I didn’t even have words for what I was experiencing.
Jones: What got you through it?
Bianco: I don’t…