Before 2024, Bearden native Cassidy Kelly had spent three years as the assistant girls’ basketball, softball and track coach in Fordyce.
During that time, the 29-year-old Kelly said she had “always been like mom to most” of the students she coached.
It was because of this dynamic that one of her former players called her the morning of June 21 from the Mad Butcher grocery store as a man fired a 12-gauge shotgun indiscriminately throughout the store.
The girl and two other of Kelly’s former students were there. Two were working as employees and the other was shopping.
“They were panicking because they didn’t have a parent or anything near,” Kelly recalled in a phone conversation last week. “You could still hear someone shooting in the background.”
Kelly was “right down the road” with her mother and son when she received the call.
She quickly rushed to the scene. There, she saw one of her best friends who works for the Camden Police Department.
“I immediately saw him and ran to him,” Kelly said “I was like, ‘Are my girls OK?’ And they all were, thankfully.”
Kelly said the girls were “shook up” from the ordeal even a week later.
“I actually had one message me about 20 minutes ago and asked if I could help them with some food, because they just didn’t want to go in a Walmart or anything yet,” Kelly said. “It’s going to be a process for them. That’s a lot to process and see when you’re 16, 17, 18 years old.”
The next day Kelly starting forging a plan to help the city.
She did so with her friend Kevin Archer.
Their plan came from a shared history of playing softball “our whole lives” and in their roles as president and vice president of their coed league that plays in Fordyce on Tuesdays.
On July 20 the duo has set a charity softball tournament to be held at the Fordyce Civic Center.
With a goal of fielding 20 teams, Kelly and Archer hope to raise $10,000 for the shooting victims’ families and survivors.
“The softball community in Arkansas has always stuck together. They’ve always been very supportive of one another,” Kelly said. “We knew that would be a quick way to raise money because the community sticks together.”
In a week where some in the town had “lost a lot of hope” in Fordyce, the tournament aims to “show people we can go out, we can have fun, we can honor those that were lost. We can honor those who are affected while having fun. We can’t live in fear. That’s been mine and Kevin’s big thing is trying to help the community show you can’t live in fear.”
Along with an entry fee of $225 per team, proceeds from concessions will go toward the cause, as well as portions of what vendors make.
On Friday, they planned to set up a bank account under the tournament’s name, where donations could be made directly via Cashapp.
“After everything is done, we will disperse it evenly to everyone,” Kelly said.
As for those competing in the tournament, the winners will receive custom “Fordyce Strong” jerseys that will have the victims’ and survivors’ names on them, along with the date of the shooting. They will also get champion shirts and a trophy.
In the week since Kelly and Archer first conceived of the softball tournament, it has evolved into a lot more.
The tournament will also include a silent auction, bounce houses, food trucks and more.
The reach of their endeavor has shocked Kelly.
On Thursday morning, she got a notification about a $100 Cashapp donation from a man in Hot Springs she didn’t know.
A professional artist from Little Rock whom Kelly didn’t know called and offered to donate a portrait she’d painted to the auction after seeing a report about the tournament on TV.
Thursday afternoon, Kelly sent Archer a screenshot of the text message sent by the Arkansas Democrat-gazette requesting an interview about the softball tournament.
Sitting at his shipping and receiving job at Nucor in Sheridan, Archer began tearing up.
“‘I never expected it to grow like this,’” Archer told Kelly. “Kevin’s lived in Fordyce his whole life, so it is a really big deal to him. … We didn’t expect it to get as much coverage or anything as it has. It’s been amazing in the amount of people who have called and been like, ‘Hey, we saw you on the news can we donate this?’ As much exposure as we’ve gotten, it’s helped so much.”
Help for Fordyce — of both the financial and emotional kinds — has already been present in the town in the wake of the mass shooting.
The Rev. Chris Singer was in Chicago when news of the shooting first came across his news feed.
As updates on the number of people killed and wounded came in, the president and CEO of Lutheran Church Charities began mobilizing local volunteers for the organization’s Hearts of Mercy & Compassion group and its K-9 Comfort Dog program to make their way to Fordyce.
The volunteers, Eric Wendelbo and Mark Holt, came from the Christ the Redeemer Lutheran Church in Tulsa.
The K-9 unit, including handlers Roxy and Steve Hurry and a golden retriever named Sersis, traveled from King of Kings Lutheran Church in Glenpool, Okla.
They joined Singer in Fordyce for a few days to accomplish their missions. They described those missions as: to “provide a physical symbol of God’s mercy and compassion for those who are hurting and in need” and with Sersis, “to help people who’ve experienced a traumatic event process their grief, stress and emotions.”
While the Hearts of Mercy & Compassion group and Sersis have left Fordyce — and are accepting donations to go toward Fordyce — they left behind a reminder that they were there.
The team erected a set of five crosses in front of the Mad Butcher.
Four of the crosses bear the names of those killed in the shooting — Shirley Kay Taylor, 63; Callie Weems, 23; Roy Sturgis, 50; and Ellen Shrum, 81 — and hearts.
They’re similar to almost 2,300 crosses and hearts the group has left at the sites of other tragedies — and for special anniversaries — across the country, including the mass shooting in Uvalde, Texas two years ago.
“When I was down in Fordyce and talking with the people who are hurting and the people who are just in shock, for me to be able to be there and to be able to offer peace and presence and let them know that there’s someone else out there who cares and who knows about this, to me is really why I do it,” Singer said. “One of the things that stood out to all of us was the friendliness of the community. There’s a lot of times that we go into communities and we’re not sure kind of what to expect. And I think just the warmth and the friendliness that we’ve experienced in Fordyce stood out to all of us.”
The 5 year-old dog — with 2,000 hours of training under his collar — is one of 130 golden retrievers in 29 states that make up the K-9 Comfort Dog program.
During her time in Fordyce, Sersis encountered about 100 people, visiting places such as the pharmacy next to the Mad Butcher and the Dallas County Medical Center.
“There’s kind of this moment in this space of calm where you can kind of start to sense there’s some emotion there,” Singer said. “There were a few tears, there were a few kind of casual conversations. I would say every one of them, as we got ready to leave, there was a smile.”