Idaho survivor of a mass shooting demanding action after Uvalde tragedy

BOISE, Idaho — Tara Marie has lived most of her life in Idaho. In 2017 she attended the Route 91 Harvest music festival in Las Vegas, where 58 people were killed in a shooting.

“I don’t think our bodies are prepared or wired to deal with that level of trauma, even more than the event itself is the aftermath, the ripple effect,” Marie said.

Marie says five years later, she’s reminded of the shooting daily.

“I feel like I have healed the part of me that goes back to the shooting that I personally experienced, but I can’t erase the memory of it, I can’t erase the sounds and the images and the emotion of it,” she said. “What gets to me every time another mass shooting happens, is because I feel that, I lived that, I remember it I hear it, and feel it.”

Marie is still in touch with her friends whom she attended the concert with. She said everyone grieves differently. For her, every time a shooting takes place, she is triggered.

“You can take medication and counseling and I’ve done all that, but every single time it happens, I bury my head in the sand, which I am very ashamed of and I declare a mental health day and I take really good care of myself that day and I let my emotions process, and then I put my head back in the sand,” she said. “But it’s gotten so frequent now that I don’t even have time to put my head back in the sand before another one rips through.”

Marie said, on Friday she reached a breaking point.

“Last Friday morning I took my son to school which now feels like I’m dropping him off at a battleground but that morning when my alarm went off and I woke up, I was in the middle of a mass shooting in my dream,” she said.

“My whole world just started going dark, I actually ended up finding my way to my medicine cabinet and I almost ended my life, literally the only reason I am still sitting here today is because right before I did it, I remembered that I have five children, five.”

Marie said she spent Memorial Day weekend in the psych hold on suicide watch.

“I just want the right to be alive, I just want the right for my children to be alive because for me if we don’t have the fundamental right to be alive and be safe, none of the other rights matter,” she said. “I want my children to be able to grow up, I want this earth to be a place where they can live and love and find joy.”

Marie said in order to stop mass shootings, it takes effort from all sides.

“We have to sit down together, we have to all say, we have a right, we all do, we have a right to be alive,” she said. “The more shootings that happen the more survivors we have how many survivors is it going to take to make our voice loud enough, I don’t know what the answers are but doing nothing is not one of them.”

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