Justin Dove loved writing and talking about sports, the blues and going to concerts with his dad.
His father, Ron Dove, raised him with help from his parents. He called his son empathetic, smart and inquiring but also loving. “Just a very good person.”
“I always remembered him being interested in writing,” Ron said.
As a teenager, Justin found a passion for writing. He wrote about sports as a freelancer for The Capital. After college, he decided against journalism and headed instead to Stansbury Research, where he was managing editor of the investment information publishing company.
Although he hadn’t worked at the newspaper for years, the 34-year-old Crownsville man was hit hard emotionally when a gunman entered his old newsroom on June 28 and killed five employees.
The news followed the loss of one friend to cancer and another to suicide.
“I think he was just so affected by everything that happened,” said Sandra Dove, his stepmother. “I don’t think he knew how to take all that in.”
Sandra noted gradual changes in her stepson. Justin was always so incredibly social. His friends nicknamed him Mr. Lovey Dovey because of how much he cared for friends and family.
That summer, he started to isolate himself.
His appearance changed. He used to keep himself very neat and she remembered that he began to “let himself go.”
Finally, Justin stopped writing, she said, except for a few words about his feelings about the shooting and the other deaths in a Facebook post on July 29.
“I’ve been going through some times lately. Maybe you can relate? But it’s helped me learn a very powerful lesson,” he wrote. “If you’re down and out … or having a bad day/week/year…or maybe even pissed off at the world around you, I’ve found a simple solution.”
“Bring joy to other people’s lives.”
On Aug. 19, Justin took his own life.
When Rebecca Smith, Wendi Winters, Rob Hiaasen, Gerald Fischman and John McNamara were killed in such a violent manner, it disrupted not only the Capital Gazette but touched people far from the newsroom.
On that day, Annapolis was a victim. Justin Dove was a victim too.
When a community faces a tragedy together, it grieves together. Through services like vigils or memorials, Annapolis did just that.
“It is our natural way of honoring the people who were killed and of sharing grief. We feel if we were part of the tragedy as a community then we can also be part of the healing as a community,” said Dr. Victor Welzant, a nationally recognized trauma expert at Johns Hopkins University.
Research shows it’s risky to draw direct connections between events such as mass shootings and suicides. But there have been others.
As Parkland, Florida neared the one year anniversary of the shooting there, two young people tied to Marjorie Douglass Stoneman High School killed themselves. Around the same time, the parent of a child killed in the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting committed suicide.
Welzant and other mental health professionals said that people should reach out to one another after an event such as a mass shooting.
“The message is please keep an eye on each other, if you think someone is struggling, ask them,” Welzant said. “Don’t be afraid to talk about it and if you are talking about suicide, please don’t be afraid to ask them directly.”
First responders
Among the first to know about the shooting were the police and firefighters called to the scene on Bestgate Road that day.
Police say a man with a longstanding grudge against the paper blocked the back entrance to the news organization’s first-floor office, then used a shotgun to blast his way through the front doors. He killed five, but six people escaped with their lives.
Police arrived in 60 seconds, alerted by social media reporting from the newsroom and 911 calls.
William Krampf, now retired from Anne Arundel County police, got the call for an active shooter that day. He was acting chief that day, working from police Chief Timothy Altomare was away on vacation.
Krampf had to separate himself mentally to get the job done despite knowing some of the reporters in the newsroom.
“I’ve been able to compartmentalize a lot of my career and look at the divide between my job and my personal life,” Krampf said.
Anne Arundel County police have declined to talk about the emotional impact of officers still on the force. But they have previously said the department officers with training on dealing with the trauma-related stress, as well as counseling.
As part of the Anne Arundel Fire Department protocol, all firefighters go through stress first aid training. If they want to talk to someone, they can connect with a peer through a support team created in 2017.
“With all of us having to stress first aid, we know what to look for within each other,” said Capt. Russ Davies, a department spokesman.
“It is important to have someone who understands your perspective and where you are coming from. If families are not part of your profession, you may not want to expose them to what you have seen or your reaction.”
One of the peer support leaders, Jen Burrier, said the concept is to have a space to talk to someone who knows what it is like to be out on the job.
“We are not counselors, we are just peers,” Burrier said. “The major benefit that we have, first of all, is that they are comfortable with us. We understand what it looks like to go on different calls, we live the same life and we are able to relate to them in the same capacity.”
A community response
In the month after the shooting — calls to the Anne Arundel County Mental Health Agency warm line hit 2,357, which was 500 more than July 2017. The service connects callers to staff for information, support and referrals.
“When we have situations just like this, not just in Maryland, we see more calls because people become more vigilant,” Crisis Response Director Jen Corbin said.
Trauma, or traumatic stress, is considered to be a normal reaction to natural disasters, crashes, violent crimes or terrorist attacks. As it settles into a community, there can be a number of different responses — anger, anxiety, sadness, compassion.
“We all have the potential to lose things symbolically when something like this happens, what we lose is often personal,” Welzant said.
“It is an illusion of safety that many of us have.”
Mental health professionals worked to offer a variety of services in the days after the shooting.
Dr. Gillian Schwietzer convinced therapists and mental health experts to offer free counseling to those who were impacted.
“I reached out to everyone I knew and said I want to get volunteers and make them available,” Schwietzer said. “I got an overwhelming response.”
Within a week, Schwietzer named the coalition Annapolis Cares, created a website and began to coordinated pairing therapists with those who were deeply affected by the event. She worked with 20 therapists and psychiatrists.
“Everyone wanted to help,” she said. “It was then that I fell in love with the Annapolis’ mental health world because these are people who had completely full schedules, who went out of their way to make themselves available and for free.”
In addition to Annapolis Cares for victims and families, Crisis Response provided resources and the Hospice of the Chesapeake in Pasadena offered grief counselors to those directly and not directly affected in the greater community.
When Corbin and her team responded to the event, they worked closely with employees and others in the building to make sure they could get access to the help they needed. They focused telling those affected that it was “OK to not feel OK,” Corbin said.
“This is something traumatic and we need to take it day by day.”
The Chesapeake Life Center and Hospice of the Chesapeake in Pasadena received referrals from crisis response to offer longer-term services with counseling support groups, said Amy Stapleton, bereavement services manager.
“(Crisis response) is going to do very basic mental health first aid in an outstanding way at the scene, but they are not really going to provide follow up care after that,” Stapleton said. “They are going to refer them to us.”
Tribune Publishing and Baltimore Sun Media, owners of The Capital, worked with Crisis Response and Annapolis Cares in the aftermath of the shooting to make sure counseling services were quickly made available to all employees.
In the year since then, the company has made longer-term services available through its employee benefit programs to those who need them.
Trauma may not necessarily manifest quickly, she said. So such services can provide assistance when it finally does.
“Not everybody is going to respond to trauma or grief in the same way,” she said. “That is on us as mental health professionals to offer a variety of resources to people who are experiencing trauma or grief.”
A turn to faith
Many in the faith community organized an impromptu vigil the night of the shooting to honor those who died.
The Rev. Ryan Sirmons, one of the coordinators, said he felt the initial shock and then turned it into action after getting a call from another pastor.
“We decided to start shaping something and bringing the faith community back together to focus in on the people who died,” he explained.
That night, 500 people attended the vigil across Bestgate Road from the Capital Gazette newsroom.
The Rev. John Crestwell, from the Unitarian Universalist Church in Parole, recalled how the shooting brought up certain emotions for his church. Wendi Winters was a longtime member of the congregation.
“A lot of people have been triggered by this and by their own traumas,” Crestwell said. “Whether it is in a marriage, a relationship, at work … the political environment. All of it has been triggering.”
But the emotional response, specifically the anger, could be honed for a productive response.
Crestwell said members of the community participated in two blood drives, events once coordinated by Winters, and worked with Anne Arundel Connecting Together to talk gun violence and other issues.
“We see from our community leaders, a righteous anger to take that negative experience and turn it around into something that can be transformative,” he said.
Still, Crestwell said there was profound sadness.
“We were grieving in a number of ways.” he said.
Some of that sadness was there on the day of Justin’s memorial service. There were more than 100 seats and people still had to stand.
Sandra considers that a sign that he had “touched so many people.” They talked about his death in hopes that understanding it might help others.
David Broughton, a former sports editor at The Capital, recalled Justin as a dependable contributor. He said he was a great sports fan, and that made him a good sports reporter.
“Justin was an integral part of our parttime sports staff,” he said. “He was a guy who didn’t get a lot of glory, he was getting quotes and tracking down coaches.”
“We were sad to see him go when he left and shocked and when we heard about what happened.”
It was that kind of relationship, that made his parents proud.
“I was so proud of him for being a writer, without people who write we wouldn’t know the world,” Sandra said. “Without someone describing how something is, we wouldn’t know how the world is.”
