Aurora shootings: Sandy Phillips, mother of victim Jessi Ghawi, shares her story

IT WAS 26 minutes past midnight when Sandy Phillips’ phone rang. As she picked it up, she was forced to confront her worst fear in the world.

MY DAUGHTER, Jessi, had only lived in Colorado for a year and fifteen days, she had just moved into a new apartment and had painted it herself.

On the night Jessi was killed, her childhood friend, Brent, who was like a brother to her, was in town. It was a Thursday night and he was leaving Friday. He was a big Batman fan and she wanted to take him to the premier of the Dark Knight.

She went online to buy tickets but they were sold out.

She kept trying and was eventually able to get tickets for the 12:05am showing in Theatre 9.

We had stayed in touch throughout the day, we texted each other all the time.

That night, I went to bed but she never mentioned going to the movie. I woke up, and I thought, ‘I’ll text her to see if she’s awake’.

She wrote back immediately that they were at a movie. She said, “we’re here now, we’re going to see the Dark Knight”.

I thought it was an unusual movie for her to pick. First of all, she didn’t go to midnight movies and she wasn’t that much of a Batman fan.

I replied: “enjoy the movie and I’ll talk with you in the morning”.

She said: “go back to bed mum and get some sleep, I can’t wait for you to come visit, I need my mamma”.

I wrote back, “I need my baby girl” and hit send.

It was 12:06am in Denver.

Jessi was shot six times; once in the leg, three times in the abdomen, once in the shoulder and the fatal head wound that left a five-inch hole in the left side of her head.

The phone rang about 20 minutes after that.

It was Brent.

I thought, ‘that’s weird, they’re in the movies’.

I said, “hey baby, what’s going on”?

I could hear screaming in the background. He said, “there’s been a shooting”.

“What are you talking about?” I asked.

He told me there had been a random shooting. I asked him if he was OK.

He said, “I think I’ve been shot twice”.

As he’s saying that and I’m hearing the screaming, I’m registering that he’s the one calling, not Jessi.

“Where’s Jessi?” I asked

He said, “I tried”.

“Tell me she’s OK.” I said.

He didn’t say anything.

“Please Brent, tell me she’s not dead.”

He couldn’t tell me that.

Our lives changed in that moment.

Sandy Phillips, pictured with her husband and daughter, Jessi.

THE FALLOUT

I don’t want anyone to ever be in our shoes.

It turned out that Brent had been shot once but the bullet travelled through his body, the shrapnel had hit him and it felt like it was two shots when it was actually one.

He had to go through three surgeries.

He thought Jessi had only been hit twice, once in the leg and once in the head, but it turned out that she’d been shot six times. The bullet he thought hit her leg went through that leg and into the other leg.

She was also hit three times in the abdomen, once in the shoulder that broke her clavicle — and there was the head wound that killed her that left a five-inch hole in the left side of her head.

Jessi died in a police car on the way to the hospital.

One of the first officers on the scene happened to be a paramedic. He told two officers to take Jessi in the back of their car and they did.

I was grateful, very grateful that she was taken out of the theatre because except for another victim, all those other people, the other ten, were left in that theatre for hours and hours.

The thought of that made me sick — that she might have been there alone — a crime scene victim.

I had nightmares about that until my son flew out to Denver.

He’s a firefighter and a paramedic.

When he clarified what had happened and said the police had tried to save her, I said “oh thank god”.

It was such a little thing but it meant so much to know she was in the arms of someone when she died.

I know what they went through that night and what they saw, and how they tried to help Jessi, but it was too late.

The last text Jessi sent her mother read, “I can’t wait for you to come next week. I need my mamma”.

The killer used armoured piercing bullets — these things are military grade ammo. They went though walls and from people in to other people.

It was chaos, it was war.

The police that got there and went in have all testified that they’d never seen anything as bad as what they witnessed there.

Jessi was a journalist, finishing school and covering sports. She wanted to be a hockey sports journalist or a broadcaster. She was good at it.

I keep thinking about Jessi being a 24-year-old, very pretty journalist and Alison Parker being a very pretty, 24-year-old journalist. Nothing but hope and joy in their lives, looking forward to their careers, enjoying their careers, and then I think how a bullet took everything away in a heartbeat.

I keep thinking of her parents and the fact that the monster who killed her was filming it and that it’s out there.

I thought immediately, ‘I hope her mum wasn’t watching television, I hope her mum didn’t see that’.

The trauma of a traumatic killing, a traumatic death, is something you can never, ever walk away from. You may have moments of the day where the fog is not blinding you, but it’s always there, it’s always lurking. You never know when it’s going to hit, how hard it’s going to hit.

You can never truly prepare for it.

My husband and I walk through hell every day now, that’s what we do. Whatever is in the afterlife, I hope it’ll be better than this.

An AR-15 Colt Tactical Carbine assault rifle, similar to one of the weapons used by the gunman when he went on a shooting killing spree inside a movie cinema in Aurora, Colorado, USA.

LEARNING THE FULL TRUTH

It took me three years to read Jessi’s autopsy. My husband and I didn’t want to see the pictures, but we did want to see the report. It was brutal.

I had had a phone conversation with the coroner early on but in his kindness, he didn’t tell me the damage that was done.

We were getting ready to speak on gun control and work with survivors.

I felt we need to be able to talk honestly about what happened, if we’re closing our eyes to this, and saying, ‘oh she was shot in the head’, we’re doing a disservice to our daughter.

So we bucked up, held hands, grabbed a box of tissues and read it.

It was by far the hardest thing I’ve ever had to look at and by far the hardest thing I’ve ever had to read.

But you can’t wake America up unless they understand what it’s like.

A man pauses at a memorial near the Century 16 movie theatre in Aurora, Colorado. Picture: Dom Emmert

When the Newtown families are able to say, ‘the back of my son’s head was missing’, when one of them can stand and say, ‘my little six-year old was shot nine times by these bullets’, those are the images that America needs. If you can verbally paint that picture for them to see and imagine, then perhaps we can change hearts and minds.

I was scared to death of going into the courtroom. We were surprised by how small the courtroom was.

We were surprised that *he was very pasty, very white, very flabby.

He had lost all his tone of being a young man in good shape. He reminded me of Jabba the Hutt, he was just blobby and flabby, far from crazy, he knew what was going on around him, he was laughing and joking with his attorneys.

He behaved very differently when the jury wasn’t in the room. When the cameras and the jury were in the room he had an audience, the rest of the time he looked and behaved very differently.

But I was no longer afraid, because he couldn’t take anything else away from me ever again.

‘I keep thinking about Jessi being a 24-year-old, very pretty journalist and Alison Parker being a very pretty, 24-year-old journalist’.

GUN LAWS NEED TO CHANGE

We are totally different people than we were before, with a totally different purpose and mission. Our plan is to live our lives as fully as we can — as joyfully as we can — to honour Jessi and to educate the public on what our journey has been, the things we thought we knew and the protections we thought, as citizens, we had.

We found out none of that was true the hard way.

We want to educate people that you are one degree of separation from this happening to you at any place, any time, anywhere.

I am a gun owner, a responsible gun owner. I’ve had a gun since I was ten years old, my parents were both excellent shots, we used to go hunting. I was brought up in an environment with a healthy respect for guns. We used guns for sport and for target practice, that was it.

What’s happened to our gun laws is crazy.

Aurora was an eye opener because these were just people at a movie. They were sitting targets. A lot of them didn’t have time to even realise what was going on, they all thought it was a prank at first.

We made it very easy for this person, who should never have been able to get a gun, to order ammo online without even having to submit driver’s license.

Online sales of ammo, and guns, and armour, and incendiary devices — that is our country’s biggest worry because if this guy can do what he did, imagine somebody whose intent is to do something bigger.

Let’s say there’s a whole team of terrorists, and they can do the exact same thing. It doesn’t matter if they are foreign or domestic terrorists, or just the crazy guy down the block, everybody can do this and we turn a blind eye because of the second amendment.

Sandy Phillips embraces a friend as she leaves the Arapahoe County Courthouse in August, 2015. Picture: David Zalubowski

We are so far from being well regulated. Gun manufacturers are the only manufacturers that have immunity from lawsuits in America. Now how does that happen?

The NRA snuck it through, nobody noticed and boom. Now it’s law.

The horse is out of the barn.

There are more than 300 million guns in America. Gun sales are down, which means if only 40 per cent of the people own guns in America, that means that 40 per cent own multiple guns.

You can’t put that horse back in the barn, it’s running loose.

But what you can do is tighten the laws that do exist, that will keep people from being slaughtered in their schools, movies houses and churches.

If you’ve got good background checks, that supply will dry up. It will take time, but it will dry up. It will be harder for the bad guys to get their hands on the guns.

It’s going to take drastic change. Drastic, purposeful leadership to get it done.

FINDING PEACE

For a long time I didn’t know if Jessi ever got that last text message from me or not, because, of course, her phone was held for evidence.

When we got the phone back I found out she had.

That made me feel good.

I know my text put a smile on her face.

I knew her so well, I knew it made her smile.

Jessi’s Message Fund was established by her mother Sandy for the purpose of empowering other victims and survivors of violence across the country and to advocate in their communities for violence prevention. To donate, visit Jessi’s Message here.

* Out of respect to Sandy Phillips, news.com.au has not published the name of the convicted killer of the 2012 Aurora shootings.

Continue the conversation with Sandy via Twitter @MamaRedfield

For 24/7 crisis support and suicide prevention services call Lifeline on 13 11 14 or visit lifeline.org.au.

— as told to Matt Young