A mom who survived the Highland Park massacre alongside her 6-year-old son angrily gatecrashed a press event over the Nashville school shooting to rip politicians for “failing” kids — imploring: “How are our children still dying?”
“Aren’t you guys tired of covering this?” Ashbey Beasley, 47, asked reporters Monday, seconds after officials finished giving updates about Monday’s school-shooting murders of six, including three 9-year-old kids.
“Aren’t you guys tired of being here and covering all these mass shootings?” she asked.
“I’m from Highland Park, Illinois — my son and I survived a mass shooting over the summer,” she said of the July 4th parade massacre of seven.
With clear contempt, she detailed how she found herself close to yet more carnage Monday because she was “in Tennessee on a family vacation, with my son,” who is now 7.
“I have been lobbying in [Washington] DC since we survived a mass shooting in July. I have met with over 130 lawmakers,” she said of her ongoing yet so-far fruitless activism.
“How is this still happening?” she asked.
“How are our children still dying and why are we failing them?”
Again asking the gathered press if they were not “sick of it,” she said that “we have to call our lawmakers and we all have to make our lawmakers make change now” and “step up and pass gun safety legislation.“
“Or this is gonna keep happening, and it’s going to be your kid and your kid and your kid and your kid next,” she said, pointing out random reporters to stress her point.
In an added, painful irony, Beasley had been about to meet a friend also devastated by mass shootings, having lost a son in the 2018 Waffle House attack in which four died also in Tennessee.
Instead, the friend, Shaundelle Brooks, called in a panic to reveal her son’s school was in lockdown after the attack on neighboring The Covenant School, Beasley told The Washington Post.
“I couldn’t even fully process it,” she said.
“What do you say? Because only in America can you survive a mass shooting and go and make a friend who is the victim of a mass shooting and then go to meet that friend for lunch … and end up in the middle of another mass shooting event.”
Beasley said her son is forever changed by surviving the Highland Park parade attack, whcih they first thought was fireworks.
“My son had laid himself out on the ground and was just crying, ‘I don’t want to die, I don’t want to die’ — screaming it over and over again,” she recalled.
Since then, “he said to me, ‘I didn’t realize I could just die at any time.’ ”
Seeing officials yet again outline a similar outrage on Monday, “I just was like, ‘I have to say something,’” she told the paper.
“I just started talking, and I figured, ‘Someone will listen,’” she said.
“These aren’t sticking, and I guess an angry mom has to get up and has to say it,” she also told USA Today.
