'Where were their guardian angels?': The struggle to cope with ONB shooting 1 year later

Jessica Barrick looked down at her left hand and adjusted the solitaire diamond ring.

It is one of the constant reminders of her husband, Josh, and their time together.

She sees him everywhere:

In their two young children.

In the three necklaces she wears — one with the initials of her family members, another of an angel wing with Josh's birthstone and one with two hearts.

"Mine inside his," she explained.

Even in the pantry, where a bottle of Awesome Sauce remains unopened. It's the first gift he ever gave her, back when they were just two people falling in love.

She can still hear him saying it.

"Awesome Sauce," Jessica said, dropping her voice to mimic her husband. Then she smiled.

They met in 2011 during the Fourth of July weekend in Savannah, Georgia. They were engaged by December and married the following October.

"There was something about his eyes," she said. "He had these big, bright eyes. And I just knew he was good and decent."

She remembers every second of how they met.

She now knows every second of the morning of April 10, 2023, when her husband's coworker came to Old National Bank at Preston's Pointe and opened fire on the monthly sales meeting, killing Josh and four others.

She knows because she had to know. She needed to know what Josh went through.

"He was my person," she said.

After he was gone, she went through his clothes, searching for ... anything.

She found inspirational words he had jotted down.

She found a ripped piece of paper with a Bible verse.

She found a page of motivational quotes.

A trail of the man left behind, note by note.

'There was nowhere to go'

When Dana Mitchell pulls into the parking lot of a grocery store, she gets out of her car and rushes inside and away from the front of the store as quickly as possible.

When she is at restaurants, she sits where she can see the doorway or who is going up and down a sidewalk.

Thunder Over Louisville doesn't scare her, because she's expecting the noise. It's the unknown that frightens her.

"It's so easy to let it consume you," she said. "You really have to fight it. You really do just talk yourself off the edge."

She was hit with one of the more than 40 bullets fired that day. It left a wound 10 inches long that took months to close. She still suffers from nerve pain and struggles with what happened one year ago.

"Some days, it's still so fresh," she said. "I really did not think a year later it would still feel this way. I really didn't, but I’ve never witnessed anything like that before. I've never had to step over my friends when they were lying there dead."

She can't help you understand that day or know what it was like to experience it.

She only knows what isn't helpful.

"There are things that people say, that I know they mean well, like, 'Oh you had a guardian angel that day' ..." Dana said, "I think, 'Why me? Where were their guardian angels?'"

The coworkers on either side of her were killed.

"When it started, the main thing was get away, get down, get somewhere," Dana said of the shooting. "There was nowhere to go. We were all in a room together. I just got on the floor and laid as still as possible"

This isn't her first trauma, but as she has done before, she is determined not to let it keep her from enjoying the present.

She has a bucket list, checking off a girls' trip to Mardi Gras this year, but a sense of guilt often causes her to pull back when she's having fun.

"When I try to do things and enjoy myself, there's a part of me that says, 'They don't get to do this anymore. They don't have Mother's Day. Their kids don't get to celebrate with their mom or dad,'" Dana told The Courier Journal. "I've got friends that are gone and somehow or another, I was the lucky one."

'Something has to change because doing nothing is not working'

There are stories surrounding the mass shooting on April 10, 2023, at Old National Bank that Jessica, Dana and the other survivors and families will keep to themselves. For some, it's too hard to share anything about that day with others.

What they now carry varies by their or their loved one's spot around an oval conference table.

What they now carry was determined by someone they barely knew with a weapon he barely knew.

"I believe everyone should have the right to own a weapon if they choose to," Dana said. "There are certain weapons I do not feel need to be owned by the average person — those are assault weapons. I know I made the statement before that when that was written, our forefathers had no idea that those weapons would turn into what we have today. I think if those types of weapons existed back then, it would have been written differently. That’s my opinion.

"So, something has to change, because doing nothing is not working."

From color to black and white

The Barricks spent the week before Easter 2023 on spring break with friends in Watercolor, Florida. Josh and some of the other dads took a mini trip up to the Masters Tournament at Augusta National Golf Course.

Jessica had never seen Josh so excited, outside of the kids being born. He even brought back one of Augusta's legendary pimento cheese sandwiches, along with souvenirs for the kids.

Josh woke up the morning of April 10 and joked that maybe he would go in late, or even call in sick.

"You've got to get up and take the kids to school," Jessica said.

He called her on his drive to work. They laughed as they retold stories from spring break.

Josh walked into the meeting. His coworkers teased him about his tan and asked about his Masters trip. He sat with a view out the windows, his back to the doorway of the conference room.

"He was going to file our taxes later that day," Jessica said. "Normal stuff. We hung up, and 20 minutes later he was dead.

"How do you deal with that?"

For the last year, she has struggled to find the words to explain April 10.

"Horrific? Awful? All of those words don't do it justice," she said.

"Everything. In just a couple minutes ..." Her voice caught. She paused. Exhaled.

"Sorry," she whispered. "When he died, everything is just black and white now. He took the color from our life with him."

A Monday morning meeting

It was the day after Easter. That meant she could wear white to work, Dana Mitchell thought to herself.

She saw a coworker already sitting in the conference room before their monthly sales meeting.

She filled her favorite clear glass mug with coffee. She walked to the conference room and set the mug on the table.

"Clusterf---," it read, with florals etched into the glass.

The mug was a running joke in the office. Only Dana would have a mug like that ― and proudly use it at every meeting.

Her colleagues began to fill the room.

Juliana Farmer was just weeks into her new job. The gas tank in Jim Tutt's car was almost empty. He thought about stopping for fuel but didn't want to be late for the team meeting.

The close-knit group of coworkers gathered around the oval table. Sunshine streamed through the windows behind Dana. About five minutes into the meeting, she looked down the hallway.

She saw another colleague. She saw the long gun he was carrying. But it did not register what was about to happen.

"Until I saw him shoot at the first person," she said. "Where I was sitting, I had an advantage: I saw what that noise was. The others, half of the room, didn't. They just heard a loud noise."

Shots continued. Screams filled the room. The wall of windows became a million tiny pieces.

Blood stained her white pants.

The pieces that remain

They came from all sides of the city for that Monday morning meeting.

They had taxes to file and gas tanks to fill.

When bullets left the barrel of the AR-15-style rifle just minutes into their workday, those coworkers became part of something the rest of the city, the state and the nation know details about but, really, know nothing about.

"Right now, every night when I lay down, it is there," Dana said. "I think about it. I can close my eyes and see that room again. And see him in the hallway. And I have to literally tell myself to stop. I mean I’ll say it out loud."

Stop. Just stop.

'You have to keep moving'

Josh and Jessica's daughter has already asked her mom who will walk her down the aisle some day.

"All I see is like, 'OK, well I’ll walk her down the aisle,' but there’s so much pain in even thinking about that," Jessica said.

This is not just a fleeting moment in her life.

"For the rest of my life, I don't know how this won't be the first thing and the last thing that is on my mind, when I wake up, go to bed," she said. "It's the first thing, the last thing and everything in between."

For now, she is focused on what needs to get done today.

Not tomorrow or next week.

This very day.

Days after the shooting, when Jessica had to go pick up Josh's belongings and his car, she found his Bible.

"He was part of a men's retreat group at church, and they had these Bibles for the program they did," she said.

He had tucked notes throughout the pages. She sat in the backseat, riding away from Old National Bank in his car when Josh's Bible fell open.

"There was this quote written out (by Kobe Bryant), and I swear, it was like him talking to me," she said. "It hit me so hard."

In a 2008 interview, Bryant said, "Have a good time. Life is too short to get bogged down and be discouraged. You have to keep moving. You have to keep going. Put one foot in front of the other, smile and just keep on rolling."

Jessica got the last six words tattooed on her right forearm.

A glass half full

Dana Mitchell had been a bank teller for only two weeks the first time she saw a robbery.

"I was 19 years old," she said. "It scared the daylights out of me."

There was another one a couple of years late; a man came in and stood in line.

"It was in February, I believe," she said. "He came in and put his hat and gloves on after he came inside. I watched him and thought, 'Something doesn't seem right here.'"

She pulled an alarm because she felt so sure a robbery was going to happen.

"Sure enough, again, it was the teller next to me that got robbed," she said.

She calmly recounted the story of two more robberies.

"There were two of them that came in with guns and got every teller — on the front of the line and the drive-thru," she told The Courier Journal. "They were caught a block down the street, because again the alarms had been pulled."

How was she so calm? Tellers go through security and robbery training annually. And if you're in a branch, the training is more hands-on than the rest of the bank receives.

She's been in banking for 40 years. As for April 10, 2023, she said: "I will not let it define me.

"I will not let it be who I am. ... I am a survivor, not a victim."

From the first shot to silence, eight minutes passed. The shooter was killed. Five others died. Eight more were wounded, including two police officers.

Shattered glass covered the conference room.

A mug of cold coffee sat on the table.

It read, "Clusterf---."

Stephanie Kuzydym is an enterprise and investigative reporter. She can be reached at skuzydym@courier-journal.com. Follow her at @stephkuzy.

This article originally appeared on Louisville Courier Journal: Old National Bank mass shooting 1 year anniversary for survivor, widow