Super Bowl LVIII Rally attendees reflect on deadly shooting one year later
KANSAS CITY, Mo. (KCTV) - KANSAS CITY, Mo. (KCTV) — It was a day nearly all of Kansas City will for celebration followed by panic. A jubilant parade downtown ended with a boisterous rally at Union Station, then a shootout between two groups of people in the crowd that killed DJ Lisa Lopez-Galvin and injured more than 20 others.
Aundrea Anderson was there with her daughter, Milana, who was 11 years old at the time. They were neither shot nor were they trampled while trying to escape. Yet they still struggle to heal emotionally in the year that followed.
“In some ways, I felt calmer that day when things were happening than I do now, thinking about it, talking about it later,” Aundrea said, “because I just knew that if I were to panic, that I wouldn’t be able to think clearly enough to get us out.”
BEFORE THE PANIC
Aundrea and Milana woke up early to walk to the parade from their downtown loft, excited to take photographs like they did the year before. Milana ed getting a late start because she couldn’t figure out what to wear.
They described the parade as lighthearted and playful.
“There were people throwing footballs from apartment to apartment,” Milana ed, “soaring through the air from one apartment window to another.”
People were amped but courteous.
After the parade, they walked down to the rally. Milana was eager to go into the crowd near the rally stage as they did the previous year, but Audrea had second thoughts. She could feel the vibe shifting from enthusiastic to reckless and rowdy.
“Something about the crowd was ‘off’ compared to what we had experienced the previous year,” Aundrea said. “I definitely didn’t want to get deep into a crowd of hundreds of thousands of people.”
She decided they would watch from further back, by a tree at Pershing and Kessler Roads.
Before long, they decided to move even further away. They were fatigued from all the walking and getting hungry, so they walked west to a grassy patch in front of the original IRS building to have a snack. They were looking through the photos Aundrea took. Aundrea had headphones on. They didn’t hear gunshots, but multiple signs that something was wrong seemed to come all at once.
“An ambulance with lights and sirens started driving in our direction, then a crowd started coming out of the garage. Then I saw an officer running and jumping a barricade, leaping over,” Aundrea ed. “My first thought was just to avoid being trampled by the crowd.”
She put Milana in front of her so she could see her and put her behind the fencing at the IRS building to protect her from being trampled. Then, what she described as six to eight armed guards inside the fence grab their weapons and yell, “Move, move, move!”
Aundrea directed Milana to follow the fence line to the east, where they took cover by some dumpsters. Some young men opened the door to the adjacent parking garage and hurried inside, Milana and Audrea among them. People were hiding in stairwells. Aundrea asked what was happening and no one knew. Her best guess was an active shooter situation.
“Everybody was panicked, shocked, different states of disbelief and crying,” Aundrea described. “Everything was possible in my mind at that time, because there was just so much happening at once.”
The deafening sound of sirens and helicopters seemed never-ending. They crouched for cover in the garage waiting for some indication it was safe to leave.
‘I FELT HELPLESS’
As all this was happening, Aundrea’s youngest was at home with his nana watching on TV.
Hollis was 7 years old at the time. He had attended the parade and rally the year before but refused to go this time. He described how cold it was the year before. He described the shoulder-to-shoulder crowd as stressful.
He and his nana watched the celebration, then watched as news reporters started reporting on the chaos.
“It was really stressful,” Hollis said, “because I really felt helpless.”
He asked his nana to turn off the TV, but she said she had to keep watching because she needed to gather information. They couldn’t reach Aundrea by phone. She lost her cell phone signal the moment the parade started, so she’d been unreachable well before the rally.
“I was just terrified,” said Hollis, “and I just got my iPad and was ignoring everything on TV because it was just stressing me out a lot.”
THE ESCAPE
Aundrea said they crouched down in the garage for at least 20 minutes. When she finally felt safe going outside, she was on constant alert. As she described her vigilance, her voice faltered.
“The whole time that we were walking, I kept telling Milana, if you hear any gunshots, look for a place to take cover,” Aundrea said, “so while we were walking, we tried to stay close to the tree lines and I kept pointing out places that we could get down if we heard any gunshots.”
Aundrea kept walking until she could get cell phone service to reach her twin sister, Erin Pech, who drove her car to get Aundrea and Milana after another half mile of walking to the nearest place Erin could get to amidst all the emergency traffic and roadblocks. She was relieved to be out of the crowd and to know that Erin, her husband, Slawik, and their two children, Astoria and Aristos, were OK.
She knew they were at the parade as well. The sisters had been unable to connect all day due to the poor cell phone service.
As it happens, the Pech family was further away from the rally crowd. They attended the parade in 2020 when Astoria was little. Now, she was a Girl Scout, and the parade presented itself as an opportunity to sell Girl Scout cookies. They toted them in a cart, which left them unable to push through the crowd to get to the rally.
The two families sat in the car on gridlocked highways and finally took a wide loop around the city to get Aundrea and Milana back to their loft. Aundrea had already called her mom, Hollis’ nana, to say they were okay, but Hollis still ran to them for a giant hug as they walked in the door.
THE AFTERMATH
For weeks Milana struggled with going into any parking garage, including the one at the loft where she lives.
“Whenever we went into the garage, it would just remind me of when we went to the garage at the rally,” she said.
She ed going to Chipotle in Power and Light and stepping out of the balcony then rushing back inside because she didn’t feel safe. Aundrea was comforted knowing Milana’s school had and resources for so many children who were at the rally.
Aundrea processed it by drawing a map to compare to news reports to find out how close they had been to the shooting.
Milana’s fears subsided. She said she feels fine now. They’ve been back to Union Station numerous times to watch a movie or go to Science City.
REFLECTING A YEAR LATER
Thinking back on it for the first time in a while, Aundrea was struck by overwhelming gratitude.
“There was a mom with teenagers who comforted (Milana) when she was crying and I was trying to figure out what our next step would be,” Aundrea said. “I’m grateful that there were strangers who were willing to comfort my daughter and me too.”
She thinks often about how things could have been different if she had both of her children with her. Would she have been able to act as quickly?
Erin’s thoughts looking back are more zoomed out. It reaffirmed her concern about the level of gun violence in the city.
“It’s hard because I think we need more than ever events and situations where people can connect, and we want to feel that sense of humanity and collective, pride in the city or whatever it is that we’re excited about,” she said. “But it’s just really sad that it feels like that’s harder and harder to do without putting your own life at risk, or lives of people that you care about or strangers.”
Aundrea knows firsthand how wide-reaching the impact is.
“My heart goes out to everyone impacted that day,” she said, “from children and parents to those who watched in fear as the events unfolded on TV, knowing their loved ones were amid the chaos. The ripple effect of this tragedy on millions in the Kansas City community is something that should never have happened.”
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