Survivors of Texas church attacks say recent tragedies bring back painful memories.
FORT WORTH, Texas — The faces on the memorial wall tell a story Jeff Laster knows by heart, one that takes him back nearly 26 years to the last day he spent with his best friend.
“It always takes me back,” Laster, the associate pastor of administration at Wedgwood Baptist Church, said.
The details remain sharp.
“He had a pullover lightweight sweatshirt on, mirrored sunglasses, and he was smoking a cigarette,” Laster said, describing what he saw moments before he was shot twice in 1999.
The shooter went on to kill seven people at Wedgwood Baptist Church. For Laster, surviving the violence came down to a choice between faith and despair.
“Either it pushes you away from God or brings you closer,” he said.
Laster chose to cling to his faith, even as news of another massacre in a sacred space brought back familiar pain Wednesday.
It’s a heaviness Texans know too well, from the 2017 shooting at First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs that killed 26 people, to the 2019 attack at West Freeway Church that left two dead, to the 2022 hostage situation at Congregation Beth Israel in Colleyville.
Jeffrey Cohen was among four people held hostage during that 11-hour standoff at the Colleyville synagogue, where a gunman demanded the release of a convicted terrorist.
“It’s never going to be the same for those people,” Cohen said of recent victims’ families.
The synagogue that Cohen once found comfort in now operates under heavy security measures that have transformed the worship experience.
“Just about everybody has armed, uniformed guards. We only used licensed peace officers who can get to dispatch quickly, because that’s how it has to be now,” he said.
Cohen believes inflammatory rhetoric contributes to violence against religious communities.
“If you say something loud enough and often enough, people will start to believe it,” Cohen explained. “And it only takes someone on the margin to take action on that.”
The solution, Cohen argues, lies in unity rather than division.
“We need to get back to being a more tolerant society,” he said.
Both survivors say they hope darkness doesn’t prevail as they pray for families now experiencing the same pain they know intimately.