GREENVILLE, N.C. (WITN) – Saturday’s mass shooting at a waterfront restaurant in Southport, which took the lives of 3 and injured 5, has left many communities across the east in grief.
Nigel Edge, a former Camp Lejeune Marine, is accused of opening fire at the American Fish Company Saturday night.
The 40-year-old Edge is an Iraqi war combat veteran who says he suffers from PTSD.
At a press conference on Monday in Southport, Gov. Josh Stein voiced how the states mental health system is broken and in need of fixing.
Mental health experts say the impact of mass violence can reach far beyond the people at the scene.
“The body carries the weight,” Chris Gill, a psychotherapist with Life Spring Counseling said. “The mind carries the weight from being able to hear those stories. Even though you didn’t experience, even though you didn’t have bullets flying by your head, the body can still hold on to that tension and that unrest.”
He says for those in a crisis, seeking professional help and being real with others about how you are doing mentally is crucial.
“We need to get back to where we can find friends and families maybe even our coaches,” he said. “Or teaches or pastors, or people in the community that are our friends that we can go to and just say ‘hey I’m kind of struggling with this, can we talk through this?’”
Emergency management leaders say in times of mass violence their job is to plan for the unthinkable.
“As far as active shooters or mass violence as it were from multiple casualty events, we try to train our paramedics on triage, law enforcement has frequent trainings surrounding how to respond and act on those events and so then we try to have conversations on how to coordinate and be most efficient and rapidly respond,” Jim McArthur, a deputy director with the Pitt County Emergency Management department said. “For them to neutralize the threat and then for us to evacuate the victims.”
He stresses that paying attention and alert to your surroundings can save your life.
“Situational awareness is very important,” he said. “Knowing where you are, who is with you, who is around you always knowing where an exit is in a building it’s just like looking for an AED or a fire extinguisher knowing how to get out of whatever building you’re in other than the front door.”
Stein on Monday said that there is a systematic analysis underway of the state’s health care system to see what’s needed and what resources are needed to respond to people’s needs.
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