This as-told-to essay is part of a short series explaining what it was like during the shooting at Highland Park. It is based on a conversation with Ella Walker, an 18-year-old who just graduated from Highland Park High School. The conversation has been transcribed, condensed, and edited for clarity by Hannah Docter-Loeb.
I was in the parade with my entire family. I have three younger siblings and both of my parents were there in the Ravinia Brewing float [they own the brewery]. So we got to the parade probably a little after 9 a.m. And we were setting up and everything, decorating our cars. We had a beer trailer and we also had a Jeep with us that we decorated. There were probably around 30 to 40 people in our entire group that were walking with us.
The parade started probably a little after 10 a.m. I was in the passenger seat of the car and my dad was driving. I was supposed to be driving, which I’m very, very glad looking back now that I wasn’t, because I think I would’ve absolutely frozen. We started going in the parade and then we got to the corner of St. John’s and Central, and my dad just started turning the car to go down Central when we heard the first round of gunshots, which at first we thought were fireworks.
And I remember turning to my dad and saying, ‘what was that?’ And he goes ‘I don’t know.’ I remember looking out the front window at the crowd in red, white and blue, just a sea of people running. And there was screaming and there was crying and I had no idea what was happening. I just heard people around me shouting ‘run, run, run.’ So I got out of the car instinctively and I started running down the opposite side of Central towards the lake.
I think the scariest part of it for me was when I saw the look on my mom’s face and the concern and the terror in her eyes when she told me to get back in the car. That’s something I’m never going to get out of my head because I’ve never seen her like that before. When you come to Highland Park, you think it’s safe. We joke about it being a bubble because nothing ever happens here. And so just seeing that look on her face and seeing parents lifting their kids out of wagons and running down our streets with terror in their eyes, that’s something you never thought could happen here.
We piled probably 15 people onto our Jeep. We had the top off, we had the doors off, we had the back off. People were literally hanging onto the sides. I just remember holding onto my sister, which I don’t do very often, but I did that day. And I mean, just the look on everyone’s faces, the look on these little girls as they asked me, ‘was that gunshots?’
We drove back to my house and we get home and all just stood in my front yard for like 20 minutes. We were all just collectively in a state of shock and just not knowing what to do. I think that was the weirdest thing.
I don’t think it’s truly hit me yet, what really happened. I don’t know that it will, because I didn’t see those first accounts of people getting shot, I only heard it. I saw people running and that’s just an image that I’m never going to get out of my head. Just red, white, and blue, running away from the center of our town as gunshots were being fired at them. They were running for their lives on a day that we were supposed to be celebrating freedom. It’s just so confusing to me that this is the state of our country, that this is the state of our town that has a ban on assault rifles, and that this could still happen here.
When I got home, we sat in front of the TV, just lifeless, motionless for like seven hours as they told us to stay there. My sister’s eight and so when we got home with her friends, I told them to go upstairs because they shouldn’t be watching this. Later in the day, she was watching all the videos that were surfacing on her iPad because it was all that was on social media. These little girls, blowing bubbles out of our car in the parade, don’t get to remember being in their town’s 4th of July parade anymore. They have to remember a mass shooting.
We all grew up going there [to the place where the shooting happened]. Dairy Queen is right there. I would go there after my shows and I would get ice cream with all of my friends. And my brother scootered around there. And now we walk past those benches and all we’re going to think of is just the blood that is sprayed in front of our favorite pancake house.
