What in the world went down at the memorial jeez. Also i forget, Were Charlie's parents there?
I think his parents were there. They didn’t speak, although others referenced them in their speeches. I don’t know that I’ve seen anything from Charlie’s parents.
I’m going to be honest here to the best of my knowledge. I’m not going to blow smoke because this was an event I supported.
While the memorial was beautiful and they had the highest level of VIP speakers so security was everywhere, I feel like the average people attending was an afterthought. It was set up in a week, which was a huge feat, but it seemed to all be focused on the service itself, the VIP guests and the security of the event.
It was Arizona so it was HOT. And humid. Apparently it’s their monsoon season and they’ve had a good storm before the event. There was no shade except for cloud cover while it was there. Standing for hours and hours on black asphalt. No water, or what people did have ran out or was hot for the most part. We were told no bags, even clear bags, or coolers. Almost no accessibility to restrooms. People were just peeing where they stood or in bottles, directly on the ground in the line, or jumping into a huge dumpster to go , until police kicked them out. There were no trash cans, it looked worse than any BLM event I’ve been to, but it was a bigger event than the population of my town, so I don’t know if that means anything, but it was TRASHED. They didn’t have any origination in their lines, that led to some fights because so many people were cutting in front of people who waited hours and hours. There was no signage, no direction.
I don’t know if anyone was hurt in the fights, there was too many people but I heard the screaming. Every so often, fairly frequentl, people would start screaming for medics, who would eventually come and we could see people getting carted out.
After so many people were going down, Someone did start bringing cases of bottled water to us, hot, at the very end, but by then, it had been hours in that heat and the damage was done.
There were a large amount of elderly and unhealthy people. I don’t think that was taken into consideration. The lady who went down at my feet had POTS. It was after the event. I had to run over a block to find someone to help her. The military and whatever federal branch of law enforcement and TSA agents manning the gates and patrolling the event were not there to help people or for moral support, that was made clear. The local LEO and services were overloaded but they were working their asses off.
Also, not only are the TSA agents rude, they are utterly incompetent. Thank goodness that people there were honest. I could have easily snuck something in. I even turned in my lighter voluntarily, after I walked through security, they wouldn’t have found it.
I heard people complaining that they were treated horribly. Some said like cattle. I’m not sure what all this entailed for them.
I just personally think they should have waited another week to get these kinks worked out beforehand. But strike while the iron is hot I guess.