Nov 30, 2016 2 min read

To hear gunshots ringing out and later finding out those shots resulted in the deaths of three people and an unborn child is simply traumatic. Add to that hearing police officers calling out in despair to their partner in a sniper situation when he is pinned down.

I don’t know any of the people I shared the darkness with at 3:30 a.m. on Nov. 10. Do I really need to? They are part of my neighborhood and community. Even the coward who took the lives of his wife, Canonsburg police officer Scott Bashioum, and then his own.

I don’t live in an inner city, or a big city. I don’t live in a Third World country or a war zone. I live in an apple pie, Fourth of July community where neighbors swap food, cut each other’s grass and know the postman by his first name. Yet this tragedy happened.

At 6:30 p.m. that same day, a prayer service was held at Canonsburg’s borough building. The gathering was immense. No one really cared who anybody voted for a scant two days earlier. There wasn’t any divisive rhetoric, no concerns over skin color or sexual orientation. Just a town that was in shock and needed to take that first step, even we atheists. It was a gathering of hearts and souls and really that was all that mattered. A town in distress coming together at a single point of fellowship for the fallen.

This isn’t something that most of us experience in a lifetime. I know, at age 52, I never have. It can happen anywhere, in the flash of a rifle muzzle or pistol barrel.

What happened Nov. 10 can’t be reversed, but there is always something that can come out of it, no matter how hidden it may seem at the time.

Fred Terling

Canonsburg