Kristi Noem

But the reason why I was not talking to any of the present-day survivors is because I sort of had to make a decision.

Bernie Getz, the shooter, he's still around.

He's still talking very loudly about, you know, what he did.

But when I realized I could not also talk to his victims, I couldn't rescue their stories in the same way, I stepped away from that and I said, let me just start from the beginning.

Let me reconstruct the story because the most amazing thing to me was the way in which the victims were completely erased from this story, written out of it, didn't matter.

And so my journey was really trying to reconstruct who were they?

You know, the one thing about being a historian is we are pretty good detectives.

We have to go back to the beginning.

I was looking at everything.

I was looking at every newspaper account.

I was looking at original, you know, the probation report of Bernie Getz himself.

I was the details there, depositions, court transcripts and files.

One of the really interesting pieces of information that gave me a lot was these young men had applied for compensation, a few of them, from something that New York has, which is called the Crime Victims Board.

And if you're a victim of crime in New York City, especially in the 80s, there was this provision.

You could apply for some funding because, of course, people were disabled or injured from these horrific crimes.

And when they try to do that, they are denied.

They are decided to not be the victims.

It was they that deserved what they got.

And so from there, it was just kind of like, whoa, we got to start at the beginning.

How is it that this all happened?