United in tragedy, Oxford and Rochester Hills offer lessons to Grand Blanc

Mass shootings now happen so frequently, community leaders share a playbook for how to handle the aftermath
Rochester Hills Mayor Bryan Barnett shares what he learned when his city endured last year’s mass shooting at a splash pad
‘It could happen anywhere,” Barnett says

ROCHESTER HILLS — Mayor Bryan Barnett crouched on the floor of a pontoon making phone calls as the boat roared through a no-wake section of Lake Orion, trying to make sense of what was happening. It was June 15, 2024, and there’d been a mass shooting at a public splash pad in his community of Rochester Hills. Nine people had been shot. He arrived at the scene of the shooting to find blood and empty children’s flip flops, and “I just started bawling. I remember thinking, ‘What do I do?’”

Among the things that helped the long-time mayor through the tragedy were text messages offering both encouragement and tips from mayors from around the country who had been through similar mass-injury events.

Leaders in Grand Blanc Township may have gotten similar texts on Sunday, after five people died, including the gunman, and another eight were injured in a shooting at a Mormon church in the Flint suburb.

Rochester Hills Mayor Bryan Barnett poses for a photo in front of his office. — After a mass shooting, Rochester Hills Mayor Bryan Barnett got advice from mayors around the country who had dealt with their own attacks. Now, he’s also offering advice. (Courtesy photo)

Reached Monday, Barnett told Bridge he would be connecting with Grand Blanc officials so that he can be of service and to share what his community grappled with.

“It’s a long road ahead … hopefully I can be helpful,” Barnett said.

Fifteen miles north in Oxford, Village Police Chief Michael Solwold said he’s also ready to help Grand Blanc. He said he’s still scarred from the mass shooting at Oxford High School in 2021, when a student killed four classmates.

“We’re here for them. We’re here for the first responders,” Solwold said on Monday.

“The tragedy was hard on its own, but then the aftermath gets harder. It doesn’t get easier when you have loss or tragedy.”

Grand Blanc has joined the tragic list of Michigan cities with mass shootings in the past five years, which also includes East Lansing and the 2023 killings of three students at Michigan State University.

“It’s just, here we go again,” Solwold said. “Here’s another tragedy and you’ve got families that have lost loved ones … it’s just, just an awful, awful thing.”

Solwold said one challenge in the aftermath of the Oxford shootings was the need for public mourning and vigils, which posed a huge security risk.

Oxford Village Police Chief Michael Solwold says a 2021 school shooting was “hard on its own, but then the aftermath gets harder.” (Courtesy photo)

“We’re trying to move on from a tragedy, not set up another platform for some other crazy person to make another point here,” Solwold said.

In Rochester Hills, the mass shootings prompted a series of practical problems for the city, from GoFundMe scams and cyberattacks to determining the best spot to leave memorial flowers and teddy bears.

In the months since his city’s tragedy, Barnett has spoken to municipal leaders around the state offering advice on what to expect when the unthinkable happens in their communities, encouraging them to prepare not just for the emergency, but the challenges that inevitably come afterward,

“If it could happen in Rochester Hills,” Barnett told Bridge Michigan in June, “It could happen anywhere.”

Lessons learned

Rochester Hills is a suburban community of about 75,000 that is sometimes listed as one of the safest communities in the nation.

In a city that sometimes goes three or four years in a row without a shooting, nine people ranging in age from 4 to 78 were shot in less than a minute.

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It was a chaotic scene when Barnett arrived, with police unsure of how many had been shot, what hospitals they’d been transported to and still looking for the shooter (who within hours would die of a self-inflicted gunshot in a standoff with police).

Meanwhile, Barnett was getting a crash course on lessons that other communities had learned in mass shootings.

You can’t control social media. There were reported sightings of the shooter all around town which turned out to be false. Residents on Facebook were castigating city leaders for not sharing information quickly enough. Barnett said he decided he and his staff couldn’t respond to individual posts. He put police in charge of communication to the media, and the city disseminated that information afterward. “Social media can be a wonderful tool and a terrible tool,” Barnett said. “The most important thing isn’t letting every individual know if it’s safe for them to mow their backyard right now.”
Someone will try to make money, Part I. Barnett was still at the splash pad when the first of several fake GoFundMe campaigns popped up on social media. One claimed to be collecting money for a pregnant woman who had been shot, when no pregnant women had been victims. It collected about $10,000 before being taken down. “GoFundMe has zero tolerance for the misuse of our platform,” a spokesperson said. “Our Trust & Safety team acted quickly to remove the fundraiser mentioned, refund donors, and ban the account from using our platform for any future fundraisers. At no time did the fundraiser organizer have access to the funds raised on GoFundMe.” Police monitored accounts asking for donations for victims and verified them with the families, while city officials shepherded donations to the Community Foundation of Greater Rochester. “I don’t know what we would have done if we didn’t have a community foundation to refer people to,” Barnett said.
Someone will try to make money, Part II. By the morning after the shooting, Rochester Hill’s city office was under siege from an 8,000 percent increase in attempted cyberattacks. The attempts were unsuccessful, but Barnett now tells municipal leaders to be prepared for attacks when your city is in the news. “The last thing I was thinking at the splash pad was anything about our cybersecurity,” Barnett said. “But bad actors are thinking, ‘Oh, they’re probably vulnerable.’ Ping, ping, ping, ping.”
Listen to mental health experts. Rochester Hills officials consulted with county mental health leaders about how to help residents deal with the aftermath of the shooting. Barnett said the mental health experts recommended repainting the splash pad before reopening, turning the Department of Public Services building into a counseling center, and offering families of shooting victims rooms at The Townsend Hotel in Birmingham to avoid the sounds of a fireworks display weeks after the attack. “None of us had ever been through anything like this and and we look to them as our North Star. What do we say? How do we say it?”
Consult “the playbook.” There’s a book-length document produced by the Public Health Policy Institute at Northeastern University that is an amalgamation of lessons learned by the leaders of cities that have been victims of mass attacks. Called “The Mass Shooting Playbook,” it’s meant as a roadmap for communities dealing with the unthinkable. It’s from that playbook that Rochester Hills officials realized they needed to designate a safe space for people to create the kind of makeshift memorial that typically appears after such attacks. The splash pad was near a busy street, so officials made sure the memorial was far enough away from traffic that people could visit and take photos. The playbook is now 198 pages long, and growing. Barnett said the playbook is vital for all community leaders to read, in case they are the next to experience a tragedy.

Barnett told Bridge he doesn’t have many regrets about how the city handled the splash pad shooting. He’s grown to accept the grief he received online in the hours after the shooting for not giving residents information as quickly as they wanted. The splash pad is back in use, with a park under construction next door.

The mayor’s one regret: watching the security camera footage of the attack.

There were 36 shots in less than a minute. “And then he just drove away,” Barnett said.

“I wanted to see if I could learn from it,” Barnett said. “And it just is emblazoned on my mind. I wish I could get that out.”

Bridge senior reporter Kim Kozlowski contributed to this story.