FORT WORTH, Texas _ Death unites us.
None can escape it. None can predict the time of its coming. And none can stop it.
It is inevitable.
"It's the one thing that we all have to do," said Billy Mitchell, Wedgwood Baptist Church member and veteran Fort Worth police officer.
On Sept. 15, 1999, death happened in less than 10 minutes for eight people inside the church. Larry Gene Ashbrook, 48, walked through the door smoking a cigarette. Associate Pastor Jeff Laster reached out for Ashbrook's hand and seconds later discovered he had been shot in the stomach and left arm.
Ashbrook shot and killed seven, and then ended his own life moments later in a back pew of the church. Before his death, Ashbrook wounded seven others at the church.
Law enforcement estimated that more than 100 teens were inside the church that night attending a concert and sharing stories from the annual "See You at the Pole" rally, an event started by Burleson students in 1990 designed to gather students nationwide around their schools' flagpoles to pray for others.
As news of the carnage spread across the country on that Wednesday evening, congregations fell to their knees to pray for the fallen teens and adults, said Al Meredith, Wedgwood Church's former pastor.
The shooting shocked the people of Fort Worth to their very core, Meredith said. The children who died before their time, some of the best people in the community who were coming into their own ministries, had been suddenly, brutally, taken.
"There is never a place where people can imagine it happening where they live," Meredith said.
Until it happens.
"There is nothing that would make me wish that this would ever happen to anyone," Meredith said. "There is nothing that will ever fill those empty chairs on holidays. But if something like this had to ever happen to me, I'm glad it happened to me in Fort Worth."
Relationships, support systems, interlocking foundational friendships that have lasted to this day grew from the tragedy of that shooting, Meredith said. The city learned ways to help people who had been ignored and ways to love others who had been neglected.
Meredith said that someone told him that it would be difficult to keep the church intact following the shooting. The shooting would be like the grief that slides a married couple into divorce after the loss of a child.
Instead, church membership at Wedgwood increased by about 50 percent, Meredith said.
"I've made connections that have lasted until this day and grown stronger over time," Meredith said. "We've made relationships across denominational lines and seen ministries that just connected together.
"I cannot see the types of bonds that formed being formed in the absence of this tragedy. It forced us to pull together. Something like this either makes you fall apart or come together. Fort Worth decided to come together."
