“I introduce her as ‘a true American hero.’ And when you hear her whole story, you see that’s exactly what she is. Sometimes we don’t realize we have somebody so special in our community.”
Jim Place about Air Force Staff Sgt. Deondra Parks
When she heard the news that another racially-inspired hate attack had unfolded in unthinkable fashion at the historic Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, S.C., it all came back to her as vividly as ever:
Looking up into “those bright, beautiful, blue eyes” of the killer.
The hate he spit out at her and her friends: “Hey N———! It’s Hitler’s Birthday.”
The shooting that followed and how she lay on the floor, pretending to be dead, even as he stood over her and put a bone-shattering shotgun blast into her legs.
She remembers stealing a peek across the cafe floor at a white woman and her teenage daughter who were huddled low, clutching each other in terror as they watched the mayhem unfold.
And she remembers the screams of the nearby cashier — a young, African-American woman like herself — as the shooter turned and came for her next.
All the images came surging back to Air Force Staff Sgt. Deondra Parks after the recent unthinkable shooting in Charleston, S.C.
Nine African-Americans — including Pastor Clementa Pinckney, who also was a South Carolina state senator — were killed when Dylann Roof, a 21-year-old white supremacist, allegedly opened fire on the bible study group that had welcomed him in that evening and sat with him for more than an hour.
“I could imagine the scene there because of what I went through,” said Parks, who is stationed at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base and lives in Centerville.
In a few weeks she will deploy again to the Middle East, but on this evening, in a coffee shop by the Dayton Mall, she relived her own nightmarish ordeal.
“In a lot of ways the situation in Charleston was a lot like mine,” she said. “That’s why I knew what it smelled like – that smell of gunpowder – and what it was like to see the blood and flesh and to hear the cries.”
Parks was attacked April 20, 2010, in a Wichita Falls, Texas, book shop cafe near Sheppard Air Force Base, where she had just begun classes to become an aerospace medical technician. That night she and two fellow students had moved their study session from the base library to the cafe in town .
It was there that their assailant — 22-year-old Ross William Muehlberger, a white power advocate with a string of recent arrests for aggravated assault, robbery and intimidation — entered the cafe with a shotgun and came straight to the table where Parks and two other African-American women were sitting.
He stood next to Parks and at first she thought he was going to strike up a conversation. Then came the racial slur.
“We locked eyes and at that point Jade pushed back in her chair,” she said of her study-mate, 33-year-old Jade Henderson. “She must have seen the shotgun and that’s when he raised it and she put up her hand as he shot.”
The other woman, Tanya Jesser, ducked for cover and was unharmed. At another table, Leanna Duran, who is white, was wounded in the arm and leg.
“I tried to run and I kept tripping,” Parks said. “Each of us seemed to get two shots apiece and as I’m running I thought, ‘What the hell am I doing?’ I remembered my weapons training. We have a saying, ‘I’m up, they see me, I’m down.’ You can’t make yourself a target.”
About that time she felt a shot graze her hair and head. That’s when she went down and feigned being dead.
“When I had been in Iraq in 2007, I used to sit on my post alone and think out different scenarios,” she said. “I thought, ‘If an Iraqi ever takes over my post, what will I do?’ I knew I’d fight as hard as I could and try to defend it, but if he took my weapon and I was alone, I’d play dead.
“It’s important to have a plan ahead of time and that was mine.”
She knew she wasn’t going to plead for her life or curl up into a ball, knew her best course was to be perfectly still, which meant controlling her breathing.
“You know how when kids pretend to sleep, their eyes might tremble? I had to calm all that down, too,” she said.
“Even though I did that, he still came up and shot me in the legs. But I didn’t budge. My only movement was my body jolting from the blast.”
Some 20 seconds later, someone called out that the shooter had left. She pulled herself to Jade, who was one of three other women with non-life-threatening wounds.
Muehlberger wasn’t through. He tried to go into a nearby bar but was confronted by the doorman, Tim Donley, an Iraqi War veteran.
Muehlberger shot and killed Donley and then, with police in pursuit, fled by car to his sister’s home, locked himself in a bathroom and fired a fatal shot into his own head.
Parks, meanwhile, was rushed by helicopter to Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas. She would have six surgeries on her leg and undergo extensive therapy for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).
In the process she embraced a far more challenging concept for healing, something several of those affected in South Carolina have said they are trying to do as well.
In many ways, the 30-year-old Parks is an example for them and it is why Jim Place — the veteran high school football coach and educator who now teaches graduate courses at the University of Dayton — brings her into his classroom to speak to his students.
“I introduce her as ‘a true American hero,’” he said. “And when you hear her whole story, you see that’s exactly what she is. Sometimes we don’t realize we have somebody so special in our community. She is an amazing person.
“We really do have a hero amongst us.”
A brother’s advice
Growing up with two siblings in some of Cincinnati’s hardest edged neighborhoods, Parks said her mom — Kimberly Price Phillips — did a good job “shielding us from the violence and dangers by keeping us busy in school.”
She said until that night in Texas she’d never heard that particular racial slur directed at her. But along the way, she did experience other verbal abuse from some of her schoolmates at Withrow High School where, already as a freshman, she had been selected as a varsity cheerleader.
“I was an introvert and I was bullied all four years of high school,” she said.
She quit cheering as a junior, got an after-school job and hoped to go into law enforcement after graduation. She applied at the Cincinnati Police Department, she said, but was told it would be a few years before the next recruiting class.
After a brief time at the University of Cincinnati, she listened to her older brother’s advice.
Right after the Sept. 11 attacks in 2001, he had entered the Army and did two tours of Iraq. He suggested she join the military and, in particular, the Air Force.
Parks in 2004 became a member of the 72nd Security Forces Squadron. Changing duty stations four times in her first five years, she served two stints in Korea, one in Italy and another at Balad Air Base — better known as Camp Anaconda — in the Sunni Triangle north of Baghdad.
While deployed in Iraq, she decided she might like to be a medic instead and applied for retraining a couple of years later. That brought her to Sheppard AFB, where just two weeks into her new studies, she made that fateful trip to the book store cafe in Wichita Falls.
‘He doesn’t haunt me’
“I remember Jade rolling over to my room in the hospital to see me,” Parks said. “We prayed and then she brought something up that I hadn’t thought about. She said we should forgive him and that’s what we chose to do.
“That way he didn’t end up bigger than he was and become a part of my life. And I can tell you he doesn’t haunt me. I don’t dream about him now or see him out of the corner of my eye or in my thoughts.
“That’s not saying I accept what happened. My life was forever altered and I hate that, but I can’t sit and let it fester. I’ve got to stay positive and do anything to get myself through it mentally and physically.”
The grace, love and forgiveness she has embraced — a path now followed by several family members of victims in South Carolina — has been difficult for many other folks to fathom. They don’t know if they could find that in their own hearts had it happened to them.
With a smile, Parks shared a moment with her mother from the hospital: “I remember saying, ‘Mom, I don’t think he meant to do that. I think he was hurting.’ Well, she did NOT like that. She said ‘WHAT?’ And I just said, ‘Mom, I just don’t believe it.’”
Her recovery was not easy, physically or mentally. After she was released from the hospital, she had rods extending from her right leg to help repair her broken patella and tibia
“When I’d go out to Walmart or somewhere, people would ask ‘What happened to you?’ At first I’d tell them the truth. I’d tell them I got shot and they’d ask who did it and I’d have to tell the whole story.
“I’d end up getting racist comments from both sides, black and white. It finally got to a point where I just told a lie and said something like, ‘Yeah, I got shot guarding Obama.’”
Almost immediately after the shooting, it was discovered she was suffering from PTSD, as if she had just come from a war zone.
“I was having dreams that my attacker was a loved one,” she said quietly. “I didn’t understand why he was invading my sleep dreams, but I got help right away and my psychiatrist and my therapist helped me understand that my brain didn’t know what to do with those memories. They helped me put them where they belonged. The cognitive processing therapy helped me throw away some of those memories and keep some for good.
“And I’ll tell you, it worked amazingly.”
While some people initially had doubted she would be able to recover enough to continue her military career, she pushed forward, proved them wrong and began to blossom.
And in one way her assailant has helped her do that.
“He doesn’t haunt me, but I do use him,” she said with a grin. “In the Air Force we have physical fitness standards we have to adhere to and if I’m doing some really tough workout, I imagine his face. I use it as motivation because he would give anything to see me fail and not be here.”
She spoke about her ordeal publicly for the first time in a TEDx talk at the Victoria Theatre in 2013.
Jim Place said he and his wife Joanie, who regularly watch online video clips of the conferences, were mesmerized by her performance.
“She just blew me away and I said, ‘You know what? She’d be great for my class,’” Place said. “So I called the Base, got ahold of her and asked if she’d go to dinner with Joanie and me.
“We’ve gone to dinner several times now and we really value her friendship. And she’s spoken to my classes maybe five times and then gone around and spoke at schools, too, about bullying and getting beyond it.”
The last time Parks spoke to Place’s students was perhaps the hardest. It came the morning after the Charleston shootings.
‘A true American hero’
At first she wasn’t sure she could do it.
“My emotions were out of whack,” she said. “I’d never responded that way before — not to Sandy Hook or the Colorado movie shooting, none of them. Maybe this one was too close to home because it seemed racially motivated, too.”
She went through with the talk and Place’s daughter Carolyn, who had heard her speak a few times before, told her it was her best presentation ever.
“She’s just so warm, so charismatic,” Jim Place said. “If she’s in a room — whether it’s a restaurant, a UD class or a group of middle school kids — that room just lights up.
“When she comes to my class, we don’t do anything at first. We just show the (TEDx) video. Then I walk up and say, ‘Now my friends, a true American hero, Deondra Parks.’
“Most of the people are shocked to see her and the place explodes. People stand up and clap. They cry. Right off they just love her.
“She talks about her journey and how hard it was to give up the hatred for what the man did do to her. She talks about forgiveness being the key to her recovery.”
Parks said two main themes emerge in the audience questions: “How could you forgive?” and “Who was your mom? Where’d you get these values?”
She continues to display those values, even with two shotgun pellets still stuck in her leg. She completed her online classes at Ashford University and last month graduated with a degree in Health Care Sciences.
Now comes her next big step: her deployment to Kuwait.
Place marvels at her dedication, her refusal to be minimized by someone else’s hate.
“In the back of your mind you know she was shot right here at home because of the color of her skin,” Place said. “Here’s a person who has chosen to go off and defend her country several times and will do it again.
“She could have taken a full discharge with full benefits — could have been paid for the rest of her life — but she wanted to continue to serve her country and to reach her goals. And that’s what she’s doing. She doesn’t ask for anything special. She goes to work every day and strives to make herself better.
“For every story of hatred in our country, there are so many others of strength and belief and all the good things we stand for,” Place said. “And Deondra Parks exemplifies all of them.”
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