DE PERE, WI (WTAQ) – The mayor at the center of one of the country’s most horrific mass shootings is talking about his experience in a new book.
On August 5, 2012, a white supremacist opened fire at the Sikh Temple of Wisconsin in Oak Creek killing six people and wounding four others before being taken out by responding police.
Mayor Steve Scaffidi says memories of that act of domestic terrorism come up every single day.
“I’d been working in my garden that beautiful summer day and I got two quick phone calls from the fire chief and police chief,” Scaffidi says, before addressing a meeting of the Public Relations Society of America – Northeast Wisconsin. “First one saying we have a shooting, the second one saying I have an officer that’s injured. As you can imagine that just takes your breath away.”
Scaffidi explains it goes just beyond the gun violence seen that day.
“Every day I think about the people who lost their lives that day and I think about the impact on our community,” explains Scaffidi. “Which remarkably has been positive. We’ve come together, we appreciate the diversity that’s in our community, and in many ways it’s made us a stronger community.”
The book entitled, Six Minutes in August, goes beyond his first person view of the situation.
“To see someone suffer like we saw in the first days after the shooting, to meet those families and get to know them it becomes part of your story,” says Scaffidi, who called the process therapeutic. “I talked really about what our response was in the first week and then how our community came together. We had a vigil in a park where 6,000 people showed up two days after the shooting, and that event sparked me to want to write about it.”
NATIONAL SPOTLIGHT
Oak Creek, a city of about 35,000 people located just outside of Milwaukee, had become the center of the universe because of the tragedy. It’s not the kind of PR one looks for, and Scaffidi should know given his extensive background in public relations and media research.
“It just was overwhelming,” Scaffidi says. “One you never expect to deal with something like that, but then you go from a mayor who runs meetings to being on camera around the world. It’s quite a jump.”
Scaffidi says between him and the PIO of the Oak Creek Police Department, they did 500 radio, television and print interviews in the first two weeks after the shooting.
“We became very accustomed to telling the story, and that’s another way to led into the process of writing the book because we told the story so many times,” said Scaffidi.
The incident also brought Scaffidi to hold important discussions about community, healing, tragedy, diversity and police response to mass shootings with the likes of President Barack Obama and Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.
CURRENT COMMUNITY
The Sikh Temple of Wisconsin on its website lists between 450 and 500 members of their congregation. Scaffidi believes the key to the quick healing process in the wake of the massacre was the Sikh community leading that charge.
“When we asked them the next day what do you need? They asked us what we needed, and they were worried about us given the tremendous horror of that Sunday,” Scaffidi says. “We have about 26 places of worship in our city of all different faiths, and they (Sikh Temple) started bringing all those groups together, so we have a lot of interfaith events now that we never had before. They participate in a lot of our community events that we never saw that level of participation before.”
Scaffidi believes that example is why the Oak Creek story can transcend all cities, even if they’re considered to be a “small city”.
“You can tell how it works and how it can work for bigger cities,” said Scaffidi. “I think that’s why we’ve been viewed as taking the lead on this and we’re proud of that.”
Proceeds from the book go Oak Creek Cares, a donor-advised fund associated with the Greater Milwaukee Foundation, whose sole mission is to raise funds to promote programs which increase the safety and security of the greater community. Scaffidi is the group’s founder.
