Tom Zoellner - A Safeway in Arizona: What the Gabrielle Giffords Shooting Tells Us About the Grand Canyon State and Life in America

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Table of Contents

This book is for the victims of January 8, 2011.

All of them, all except Phineas, constructed at infinite cost to themselves these Maginot Lines against this enemy they thought they saw across the frontier, this enemy who never attacked that wayif he ever attacked at all; if he was indeed the enemy.

John Knowles,A Separate Peace

AUTHORS NOTE

This book is an attempt to make sense of a fundamentally baffling event. I have used the tools of journalism to arrive at a few conclusions. Several personal biasesexplained within the textmake this not a work of objective journalism in the traditional sense, though I have striven to be fair to all concerned.

ONE

THE SAFEWAY

On the morning of January 8, 2011, a cluster of people began to come together under the brick facade of a Safeway supermarket, where U.S. Representative Gabrielle Giffords was supposed to stand for a few hours and meet with anyone who wanted to talk with her.

The Safeway is known within the company as Store #1255, and it serves as the anchor of a retail plaza called La Toscana Village in the unincorporated northern suburbs of Tucson, Arizona. Three brick arches out front were designed as an homage not to Tucson but to the Tuscany region of Italy. Their bricks are maroon-colored and coarse. The columns are smooth white concrete.

The idea to do these supermarket events didnt come from Gabrielle. It was from Rahm Emanuel, now mayor of Chicago, who had served in Congress himself for three terms before becoming chief of staff to President Barack Obama. He used to run these events from plazas around his Chicago district, reasoning that grocery shopping was a universal activity in a car-based society and that the visibility would be high.

Gabrielle, a forty-year-old with short chestnut-colored hair, pulled into La Toscana Village at 9:58 A.M. in her green Toyota 4Runner. Before getting out, she reached for her iPad to put out a message on Twitter, which she had been using liberally for the last several months.

My 1st Congress on Your Corner starts now,

she wrote,

Please stop by to let me know what is on your
mind or tweet me later.

The air was a little cold for a January afternoon, and she was wearing a short black skirt, black stockings, and a red blouse. No coat. The temperature that morning had been slightly above freezing after sunup at 7:25 A.M., and would gradually warm up throughout the day to an eventual high of fifty-nine degrees, gentle enough for a golf shirt and shorts. The air was desert-crisp and the sky was a bright blue. No significant weather was observed was the summary of the National Weather Service on that days meteorological activity in Tucson.

That same day in Wilmington, Ohio, the thermometer reached a high of twenty-two degrees, with light snow and fog cluttering the air. Portland, Oregon, reported a high of forty-four with heavy rain and Albany, New York, checked in at twenty-five degrees and clear. It was, in short, the kind of day on which the economic foundations of Arizona had been built.

Gabrielle got out of the vehicle and walked toward the three arches of the Safeway front, where her staff was busy setting up the temporary event. Good morning, Mr. Kimble! she said to her press aide, a longtime friend named Mark Kimble who used to write a column for a local newspaper. A banner hung from the dark bricks proclaiming her in block letters: GABRIELLE GIFFORDS. UNITED STATES CONGRESS. Under it: a line of chairs, a rope, posts, creating a strong psychological cue for people to form up in a line to see her. A folding table to suggest a bar of office. An American flag. An Arizona flag. Portable ceremony. Prosecutors would later come up with a judicial theory that Gabrielles physical presence and the temporary reception line meant that the front of Safeway #1255 had been transformed, for a morning, into the halls of Congress.

Gabe Zimmerman had brought the folding tables and blue-padded chairs from the district office, and was busy setting them up. He was thirty years old, recently engaged to be married, a dark-haired graduate of Arizona State Universitys graduate program in social work whose tranquil demeanor with the occasional pissed-off people who called the office earned him the nickname The Constituent Whisperer. He had worked for Gabrielle for four yearsher entire time in Congressand in that span had accumulated a thick file of phone contacts within the Veterans Administration, the State Department, the Agriculture Departmentall the alcoves and inlets within the federal system that had to be pumped for information about lost benefits and delayed passports and the daily panoply of frustrations associated with getting things out of the government. Gabes earnestness had earlier earned him the nickname The Beav, as in Leave It to Beaver.

Pam Simon asked him if she could get him some hot cocoa from the Safeway, and he declined but told her to ask Daniel Hernandez, who had worked as an intern for Gabrielle for the past five days. Hernandez grew up in a bilingual household and had attended a certified nursing assistant program at Sunnyside High School. His current ambition was to win office himself, in the student government at the University of Arizona. Today he was wearing a green argyle sweater over his portly middle. Simon and Kimble went into the Safeway.

The lights are muted inside the air-conditioned cavern, and the first thing that commands a visitors attention is the flower section. Cones of daffodils and roses and racks of potted geraniums are arranged under lettering on the wall that announces POETRY IN BLOOM. Beyond that and to the left is the produce section, where bins of asparagus, tomatoes, bagged lettuce, and avocados are gathered in square bins and tilted up at an appealing angle. Oranges shine under lamps hanging from metal wires. This Safeway is of a type called the Lifestyle Store, which puts an emphasis on prepared food, such as deli subs and sushi, and has earthen interior colors instead of bright lights and linoleum. In the front is a tiered rack of coin-op machines for children. One is full of colored gumballs. Another is Spy Undercover, dispensing miniature plastic handcuffs, and yet another is Gun Collection, which displays a logo featuring a gun barrel pointing directly at the viewer; the game has a square carafe holding dozens of transparent spheres, each containing a small metal pistol with a keychain loop.

Congress on Your Corner began exactly on schedule, at 10:00 A.M. About twenty people were lined up. Forty-three-year-old Matthew Laos was the first to be seen. He wanted to show her an award he had won and chat with her about his service. He told her he was proud of her for winning her last election, then started to feel embarrassed that he was hogging her time. He got his picture taken with Gabrielle, then left.

Almost no one who came up to Gabrielle at these events during her previous term had approached her with anger or disquiet. The ceremonial aspect, even at grocery stores, seemed to put people on their good behavior. During the lead-up to the contentious health-care vote in 2009a proposition she ultimately voted fortwo young men got in one of these Congress on Your Corner lines wearing T-shirts with nasty slogans and a look set for battle on their faces, and every staff member who saw them did an eye roll. Their turn came, and they laid into her, but instead of leaning away from the spittle she had stepped forward and put a friendly hand on one of their arms as she listened to them go on about a range of issues. I understand where youre coming from

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