| This week, The Washington Post published a series on the AR-15 and its impact on America. Part of the series was a piece by reporter Silvia Foster-Frau, who wrote about a 2017 mass shooting in Sutherland Springs, Tex. Foster-Frau covered the shooting when it happened and returned to the town last year to interview survivors. It was a Sunday morning in 2017 and I was a "baby reporter," with just two years of experience in the industry, covering an annual air show for the San Antonio Express-News in Texas. I got a call from my editor that there was an active shooter situation in a town I'd never heard of: Sutherland Springs. I needed to get there as fast as I could. When I arrived, ambulances and police cars were crowding the main intersection of the one-stoplight town as information slowly unspooled: A gunman had killed more than two dozen people in the First Baptist Church. That night, people gathered in shock at the nearby gas station, where I wrote my first story about the uncle of two children who were shot and killed — and who had helped pull out bodies from the church. I spent the next few years writing about the community's pain, grief and recovery. I was privy to intimate, vulnerable moments in the lives of the survivors and victims' family members in this rural, conservative community. Over time, I gained their trust. I visited funerals, gravesites — and the rooms of some of the children who had been killed in the shooting, their stuffed animals still sitting on the shelves. By the time I joined The Post in 2021, there was little coverage of the people of Sutherland Springs; the national media had moved on long ago to the next tragedy. At first, the media's absence felt peaceful for people in the community. Then they felt forgotten, their ongoing traumas and suffering left untold. But that changed when I returned to the town last year. I was there to talk to survivors and tell a story, along with reporter Holly Bailey and photographer Lisa Krantz, about the immense human toll of shootings committed with an AR-style rifle as part of the series this week. In my reporting, I found a community still plagued with disability, infertility, lead toxicity and immense grief. Read the full story and another from the AR-15 series, plus more of the week's don't-miss stories, below.  (Lisa Krantz for The Post) Years after a shooting in a Texas town, survivors endure lifelong disability and trauma. By Silvia Foster-Frau and Holly Bailey ● Read more » |    | | | | 
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