One day this time last year, Bryan Williams was patrolling halls and lunch lines, tasks that define a head of school’s daily life.

The next, Sept. 2, 2022, it was as if the ground had opened up beneath Christ Methodist Day School.

Eliza Fletcher was a mom there. Starting with her abduction and following through the weekend with the search for her body, which was constant news, his job was suddenly to be an even larger voice, helping children — their parents and teachers — feel safe in a city that only days later on Sept. 7, was torn apart again by a rampaging Ezekiel Kelly.

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He is accused of killing three and injuring three others in a shooting spree that within an hour sent the entire city running for cover.

The idea of someone circling and randomly intersecting neighborhoods — shooting and carjacking in a reckless frenzy — completely unnerved the city, said Eric Vernon, longtime co-owner of The Bar-B-Q Shop, 1782 Madison.

“I think people understand, there’s no longer a boundary. There’s no line — property line, economic line, social line. I think people now know you can be anywhere and be affected by someone having a mental breakdown.”

The events settled into the city’s consciousness with a sickening, amorphous thud.

Talking about impermanence

“It was definitely a shattering of safety and innocence,” said Williams, who spent the rest of the week and days to come helping parents have hard conversations with their children. They were conversations about safety and impermanence in a city where a classmate’s mother can be snatched and killed and where at any minute, streets, stores and schools can erupt in gunfire.

“It really has shattered a lot of adults across the city, and it shattered a lot of kids who were familiar with the (Fletcher) family,” he said, comparing it to 9/11 and other tragedies that rattled the public’s sense of invincibility.

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Counselors and therapists saw the outpouring of grief from clients, broken with the realization that simply living — shopping, eating out, walking alone — was courting danger.

“Mostly what I heard from people was a heightened sense of danger about just living every day,” said Rod Spencer, longtime therapist at Samaritan Counseling Centers of the Mid-South. “You know, like it’s not even safe to go stand on the street corner.

“We all need to live with a certain level of security, a sense of general safety. When things like that happen, that sense of safety just gets broken.”

In his experience, it takes longer to recover than people expect.

“I think we are still in a crisis,” Spencer said. “It wasn’t just a blip and then it was over. It’s been a continuous line in some sense since then, or else a bunch of little blips.”

Planning for mass casualties

Dr. Peter Fischer was the surgeon on duty at the Elvis Presley Trauma Center at Regional One Health the night of the Kelly rampage. About dinnertime, he remembers Rodolfo Berger, shot at the AutoZone store at 4011 Jackson Ave., was in the emergency room.

Fischer could hear a wild amount of chatter coming from the attending policeman’s radio.

“His radio was just going crazy. I looked over at him, and he said, ‘I don’t know what’s going on, but something big’s going on.’”

Fischer called in a backup surgeon and then directed the team to shift to military mass casualty mode, where there may not be time to finish one surgery before the operating room is cleared for the next. 

“As everyone started to find out more and more about what was going on, everyone also had families at home. … I remember calling my wife and saying, ‘Hunker down. Don’t go anywhere. Make sure you’re at home.’

“It’s scary when you’re here trying to take care of somebody, but then you know your family’s at home,” said Fischer, who started his medical career as a paramedic, and as such, is the department’s natural liaison with MPD and Memphis Fire Department.

Berger survived. The bullet is still lodged in his abdomen.

Dewayne Tunstall, shot at 12:56 a.m. in the 3100 block of Lyndale Avenue in Highland Heights, did not survive. Neither did Richard Clark, shot at 4:35 p.m. at a gas station at 946 South Parkway E.

Allison Parker was killed at 7:23 p.m. at Poplar Avenue near Evergreen Street. 

Kelly was arrested at 9:28 p.m., hours after the city instituted a public lockdown.

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The night burns with adrenaline in Fischer’s memory and for the gut-level planning he had to do in the fog of a developing situation. He regrets calling in a back-up surgeon, which essentially meant putting another person in peril on the city streets with an active shooter. 

If the events were galvanizing, Fischer regrets the trauma did not apparently register deeply enough “to change people and change things in the city.

“The gunfire wounds come in, and they come in entirely too regularly.”

Across town, his boss, Dr. Andrew Kerwin, chief of trauma surgery, was having dinner with his wife and two new faculty members who had just moved to town for posts in the University of Tennessee Health Science Center College of Medicine.

“We started getting text messages,” Kerwin says. “It was like, ‘What the heck?’”

The group took refuge at Kerwin’s home in East Memphis and waited several hours for police to issue an all-clear.

All the while, he remembers his palpable dread that the new assistant professors would realize the level of crime they had walked into, get scared and pack up to leave.

The Elvis Presley Trauma Center sees “a staggering amount of gun violence,” Kerwin said, “far more than most places in the country.”

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The city’s reputation over the years has made the trauma center a destination training ground for surgeons who want to be trauma surgeons.

“It’s a highly sought-after training program. It’s well-known and it’s very prestigious,” Kerwin said.

About 20% of the trauma cases are gunshot wounds, “four or five times higher” than what most other trauma centers see, he said.

But the blunt force of that takes a toll on health care staff at Regional One, who see the worst cases in the city every day.

“Sometimes, you almost feel like you’ve become numb to it. It’s so much that you just get used to it, I guess,” Kerwin said. “It’s just another night on call. It’s just another day on call.”

Preserving the staff means finding ways to talk about what they see.

“We bring it up and say, ‘Hey, we know we are busier; we know the injuries are bad. So, make sure you are taking care of yourself. Make sure you are being good to yourself, doing something outside the hospital — riding bicycles, traveling, being with your family. They kind of take your mind off what you see on a daily basis.”

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Calling in backups on a Wednesday in Memphis is in no way rare. Homicides happen every day of the week, Kerwin said.

“Really, weeknights are not much different than Friday night or Saturday night ... You can have a really bad night on a Monday night and not so bad on Fridays.”

Grimness remains

Surgeons in the trauma center treated 1,400 gunshot victims in each of the past two years and are on pace to exceed that record in 2023.

In 2020, they treated 1,100 cases, Kerwin said.

As of Aug 30, there had been 253 homicides this year. Last year at the same time, the number was 197.

“I keep telling myself and hoping every day that at some point our country’s going to say enough is enough, or enough people are going say enough is enough that we can start to make some changes and move past this epidemic of gun violence,” Kerwin says.

For months, someone placed fresh flowers against the iron fence surrounding Target House, where Parker, a mother and nurse, died the night of Sept. 7, a silent, living memorial of the life that was snuffed out and the lives that continue to vanish nearly every day in Memphis.

What happened in the first week of September still feels startlingly raw, and for many, the week became the new measure of the peril of living here. 

“I think it just kind of set the tone for where we are as a city now with concerns over crime and safety and what are we doing as a city to make people safe,” said Williams.

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“There’s got to be changes in our city overall. And that leads to the mayor’s race,” he said.

Lailah Wilson, 21, grew up in Memphis. She and friends followed the rampage that night on social media, quickly making a mad dash from Olive Branch to Midtown, missing by 20-30 minutes the gunfire that killed Allison Parker on Poplar in Midtown.

“I used to think, ‘Oh, well, we’re in Midtown. There are things that go on in Midtown, but it’s only these Midtown type of things.’ I no longer think that. Anything can happen to you right now.”

Eric Vernon
The Bar-B-Q Shop

By the time police sirens were wailing in her neighborhood, Wilson was home, a few minutes away near Evergreen and Angelus Street.

“Once I was in the house, I was pretty, like safe and in a good headspace,” she said.

She and her friends don’t think much about the night, Wilson said, because in retrospect, it didn’t seem all that different from any other time in Memphis.

“A lot of people I know have seen acts of violence. This was kind of out of the ordinary, but it wasn’t something we haven’t seen before. We see a lot of shootings and gun violence.”

At The Bar-B-Q Shop, “literally 60 seconds away,” Vernon locked the doors with customers inside, hunkering down in complete terror, he said.

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“I used to think, ‘Oh, well, we’re in Midtown. There are things that go on in Midtown, but it’s only these Midtown type of things.’ I no longer think that. Anything can happen to you right now.”

He cites the gaping need for mental health care in Memphis, particularly for Black people, who he says, are used to bearing their emotional pain quietly and on their own.

“I think it’s not that we didn’t understand that we needed mental health care. We had to work. We did not have money. We just kind of had to move on. But that’s not working anymore.”

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Rev. Keith Norman, senior pastor at First Baptist Broad, remembers the first week in September with the same intensity as the rest of the city. But his recollections are ultimately positive, “good coming from evil,” including the hundreds of people, Black and white, who got up in darkness on Sept. 9, to run Eliza Fletcher’s unfinished route home, starting at 4:20 a.m.

“That showed harmony. That showed unity, and that showed that we’re all human and we care. It did not matter what race the person was. We were sensitive to a family that lost a loved one. And we wanted to see justice,” said Norman, also an executive with Baptist Memorial Hospital & Health Care Services.

Equally powerful, he said, was the attention Kelly created for untended mental health issues, particularly in Black men.

Baptist, for weeks had been planning a free health care event at the University of Memphis on Sept. 8, giving Black men specifically time with physicians and mental health experts so they could ask questions, have simple screenings and potentially strike up a rapport. Baptist hoped it would turn into appointments, not just with its providers but across the board.

“It was a great outcry. … The day prior, we only had a few registrations. The day after that (rampage) event, we had hundreds more. And they were all African American males, talking about the issues that were hurting them emotionally, mentally, physically, financially and otherwise. We want to normalize the conversation about positive African American male mental health.”

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The stereotypes of the Black male, shaped by slavery, Norman says, are grounded in words like strong, robust, self-reliant.

“All these are great things, but we also represent some of the most disenfranchised faces on the earth. In a city of poverty of 24%, you’ll find a greater preponderance of unemployed African American men and women than any other group of people.”

Kelly’s mad, random spree, and later revelations that he was suffering grief over losses of his own, “definitely brought more attention to a very heavy burden placed upon African Americans,” Norman said.

Lora (Jobe) Burke doesn’t dispute that. What she finds even more compelling in the case of Fletcher’s death is the harbinger of racism, its tentacles “reaching in everywhere.”

She cites the case of Alicia Franklin, a young Black woman who said she was raped by Cleotha Abston — the man DNA links to Fletcher’s killer — in 2021.

“Franklin reported her rape and told police where the rapist lived. I feel like her story was dismissed, and with the lawsuit that was brought, it felt like it was possibly because she is Black.

“And then this guy is allowed to continue being a criminal. And then he got Eliza,” Burke said.

Anyone paying attention at all last September, she said, knows that Fletcher’s abductor was quickly arrested, based on quick testing of DNA found in a flip-flop left at the scene.

“I just felt at the time, racism had touched her and her family and all of us because the one who killed her had been identified by someone else. He should have been in jail.”

Editor’s Note: Comments have been disabled on this article due to the subject matter.