Patrick Aaby was at a grocery store Saturday when he heard people talking. From their tone, he knew something was wrong.
“I heard them mention a Safeway store,” Aaby said. “I went up and asked, ‘What’s going on?’ ”
Aaby, 61, is a retired Everett teacher. H
e and his wife, Sue Aaby, are frequent visitors to Tucson, Ariz., where one of their daughters and their grandchildren live.
That’s where Aaby was Saturday — Tucson.
He wasn’t far from the shopping center where a gunman’s rampage killed six people including a federal judge and a 9-year-old girl, seriously wounded U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, D-Ariz., and injured 13 others.
“There’s a bakery in that shopping center. My wife and I had been there three or four weeks ago,” Aaby said. “It’s a very nice part of town.”
He not only was in Tucson, Aaby had crossed paths with one of the shooting victims, Ron Barber.
Barber, Giffords’ district director, was shot twice Saturday. A Phoenix TV station, KPHO, reported that Barber, 65, had been taken outside by wheelchair Wednesday to greet people holding a vigil at University Medical Center in Tucson.
Aaby was introduced to Barber several years ago by Dennis Embry, a Tucson-based author and researcher whose expertise is child psychology. Aaby has worked with Embry on projects to put the researcher’s findings into practical use.
Embry runs the Paxis Institute, which works to help at-risk families through parent education and other programs. “Dennis Embry is good friends with Ron Barber,” Aaby said.
Aaby said he and Barber learned they share experience in early childhood education. Aaby began his student teaching with kindergarten. He said that Barber had once been a Head Start director in Arizona.
“He’s a neat, engaging guy,” Aaby said of the injured man.
“We found we had a lot in common.”
Aaby contacted me not merely to say that he happened to be in the vicinity of the shootings, or that he knew a victim. No, Aaby sees in the awful event a warning and an opportunity.
He hopes the public and policymakers will see the shootings as evidence that the story of Jared Lee Loughner, the accused gunman, isn’t a rare and isolated case.
Aaby is troubled that many are missing a big point by focusing on politically charged rhetoric.
He thinks the larger issue is that many young people are angry, alienated and unable to cope in healthy and productive ways.
“They’re not isolated incidents,” said Aaby, who taught many years at Everett’s North Middle School.
“In the context that a congressperson was shot, that’s unusual. But try telling that to a family who has lost a child to a shooting, or to people who have become victims through random acts of violence.”
Since the shootings, Aaby has spread the word about an article written by Embry that highlights what both men see as a growing risk. Its title is “More Than a Deranged Individual; He is One of Millions.”
After retirement from the schools, Aaby, who has a doctorate in education, worked as director of government affairs for a publishing company.
He was an adviser to former Gov. Booth Gardner on drug and alcohol issues, and an adviser to Lt. Gov. Brad Owen. He was involved in Natural Helpers, a suicide prevention program for students. He said he always “had an affinity for working with tough kids.”
Aaby believes making parent education more available, and removing any stigma from the notion that parents could use a few lessons, would go a long way toward helping troubled young people.
“There are a variety of light-touch types of things — grandmother’s wisdom,” he said. “We’ve got a generation of children, some now adults, who didn’t have good role modeling. We have to be able to come up with user-friendly ways to deliver parent coaching and common sense.
“We’ve got a lot of kids out there who are invisible,” Aaby said. “In its extreme, it manifests as what we saw last Saturday.”
Julie Muhlstein: 425-339-3460, muhlstein@heraldnet.com.
Talk to us
> Give us your news tips.
> Send us a letter to the editor.
> More Herald contact information.
