The November 2022 shooting at Club Q in Colorado Springs claimed five lives. If it weren’t for Rich Fierro, an Army veteran who helped subdue the shooter, more people might have died. Fierro has been widely lauded for his bravery, but as Dan Zak finds in this moving profile, being a hero is complicated. Fierro’s wife and daughter, Jess and Kassy, survived the shooting, but his future son-in-law did not:
Rich was scared to talk to Kassy about it. Her loss showed Rich a version of his life that was impossible to contemplate: What if he had lost Jess when he was 22? He believed that he relied more on Jess’s strength than she ever had on his. Where would he be now, without her?
Here’s your story: the Green Beret coming home, and his wife jumps in his arms …
Jess had repressed so much feeling over the years, when Rich was deployed, to stay focused on the mission: keeping the family together. But now those emotions were erupting, and it felt as if everything could come apart. At one point, months after the shooting, Jess went to urgent care because she thought she was having a heart attack. Her blood pressure tripled in a matter of minutes. It was a panic attack.
But now his wife has been through the same thing …
Rich already had an understanding of his own trauma responses, and an established support system of government services and fellow military veterans. Jess and Kassy did not.
At the gala in New York—where strangers toasted his valor and Jess called him a farce—Rich would offer a diagnosis of the Fierros’ new reality after a long night of drinking: “How about a whole family with PTSD?”
How do you survive that?
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