Kristopher McLucas, MPH ’22 (Social & Behavioral Sciences), has worked with trauma survivors as a licensed mental health therapist in and around Los Angeles for 13 years. Most of his counseling has been one-to-one. So talking with more than a dozen parents and families of children lost in a mass shooting was definitely a different experience.
McLucas, a graduate of the Yale School of Public Health’s Advanced Professional MPH program, is one of three co-authors of a Giffords Law Center report on the aftermath of the Uvalde, Texas, massacre. The Uvalde Report: A Path Forward for a Community – and Nation – Struggling to Heal, was released on May 23 – the day before the first anniversary of the killings, in which a gunman walked into Robb Elementary School and fatally shot 19 fourth-graders and two teachers. Seventeen others were injured in the incident, which became the third-deadliest school shooting in the United States.
“We were coming to a situation where families are grieving. And so, just the emotional toll of being in that environment …” he said from Long Beach, where he is a consultant for the city’s department of health and human services. “It’s a small community, so you feel the pain that people are experiencing. You see the grief on the families’ faces. You’re walking into town and there are memorials everywhere.”
One of McLucas’s first stops upon arriving in Uvalde was Robb Elementary.
“To just see an elementary school, and another situation where we have kids who are dying … when you see these are children, you see their pictures, that’s impactful,” he said. “So I think that was one of the first things that really stood out for us. That was definitely a challenge.”
McLucas, a licensed clinical social worker and consultant; Paul Carrillo, vice-president of the Giffords Center for Violence Intervention; and Mike McLively, policy director for the Giffords Center for Violence Intervention, are the report’s official co-authors. But there were many unnamed contributors, too, including 26 members of the Uvalde community who bravely shared their stories so that others might learn from their experience. “The Uvalde residents provided important input and feedback after being shown the report in five Zoom debriefing sessions,” McLucas said.
It’s a small community, so you feel the pain that people are experiencing. You see the grief on the families’ faces. You’re walking into town and there are memorials everywhere.
Kristopher McLucas
McLucas was brought into the project by Carrillo, who he had worked with previously in Los Angeles. Working with great sensitivity, using the trauma-informed skills McLucas employs in his daily work, the team was able to gain the trust of the people in Uvalde. A Giffords colleague and director of operations at Garden Pathways, Inc., Diane Barrientos, previously lived in Uvalde and was key to acquiring that trust.
“Diane was really the one who helped us get connected to the families. Because it’s such a small community and it’s a rural town [population 15,000], there’s not a lot of trust of outsiders, and we wanted to be mindful of those dynamics,” McLucas said. “So having her as the lead made that process a lot easier for us.”
The report, by design, doesn’t focus on the myriad troubling questions left in the wake of the killings, such as the extensive delay by police in confronting the shooter. Rather, it concentrates on six possible solutions to help the community heal and prevent similar tragedies from happening in the future: implement more stringent gun safety laws; expand community-based programs and services for at-risk youth and young adults; develop long-term mental health services; address structural racism; reform victim compensation systems; and create trauma-informed schools.
Many of these recommendations are common-sense solutions that have been mentioned before. But three, McLucas said, stood out to him in the context of Uvalde. One was the need for gun law reform. In Uvalde, people on both sides of this divisive political issue now appear to be more accepting of the need for gun reform in the wake of the local tragedy, he said.
“This is a rural community, and hunting is very much a part of their culture,” McLucas said. “And this is a very conservative town as well. But you have people there who are saying, ‘Look, we don’t want you taking our guns, but we also realize that maybe 18 is too young to be able to have access to an assault weapon. Maybe we need to do something different.’”
Another is the need for trauma-informed schools – especially when some school districts have placed, or are considering placing, armed police in schools.
“Even if a school has been impacted by violence, you have to ask yourself, ‘Does that [inserting armed guards in local schools] actually really promote safety and security, or does it increase the anxiety and impact the trauma-related symptoms that students could be experiencing?’” he said.
McLucas said schools are a center point for communities. The question then becomes how can we help communities to be empowered such that their schools are both central to the community and a safe and supportive space? One way that can be done is by working harder to identify youth at risk and to provide more behavioral health services so that schools become a space that people feel included in rather than excluded, he said.
The third recommendation – and one that really struck McLucas – was addressing structural racism. Of the 21 victims at Robb Elementary, both teachers and all but two of the 19 children were of Mexican heritage. When asked what stood out in his research, he said it was the participants talking about the history of racism and the racial divide in their community. Some said they believed that if most of the victims were white and not Mexican, the response to the shooting would have been different. At a school board meeting last October, an almost all-white crowd demonstrated support for the local superintendent, and many also yelled at or otherwise disrespected people airing their grievances with the district’s response to the shooting, McLucas said.
There was a very clear division between the predominately white side of town and the primarily Mexican/Hispanic side of town, McLucas said. “Walking into that space, you could see the families saying, ‘Why aren’t you supporting us? We lost our children.’ They’re really looking for answers, They’re looking for a response and local officials have essentially been stonewalling them time and time again,” he said. “The family members say, ‘We haven’t even gotten an apology; no one has even said we’re sorry.’ And so that, I think, was one of the things that was just challenging.”
McLucas hopes the recommendations in the report extend beyond Uvalde and are considered nationally. He was glad to contribute to the Giffords project and hopes it catalyzes change. “If we want to make change, we have to do things to push change,” he said. “And so I think this was like a little, little, little piece of that, and it allowed me to be part of that process.”
The Uvalde project began shortly after McLucas graduated from YSPH, and he was able to apply some of the skills he learned at Yale to his work.
He learned how to critically analyze research articles from Professor Mayur M. Desai, PhD ’97, MPH ’94, which came in particularly handy. “That was one of my more challenging classes, but a lot of that information gave me the ability to critically analyze research articles, because, for the [Uvalde] paper, that’s what we were required to do,” McLucas said.
He also cited Assistant Professor Ashley Hagaman and her qualitative interviewing class. “We created interview guides, and I emailed her a few times,” McLucas said. “I was like, ‘Hey, look, I’m literally using what we did in class to guide this project.’ From the beginning to end, being able to identify who our interviewees would be, making sure we had a diverse sampling, doing all the coding – that was extraordinarily helpful as a framework.”
To find out how you can help Uvalde families, contact gcvi@giffords.org.