Photographer Andres Gonzalez has spent the past five years documenting mass shootings at American schools. He is putting together his research into a book titled American Origami, Recently interviewed, he was asked how families and communities felt about "condolence" items such as teddy bears, quilts, posters, cards, etc. The response indicates this isn't helpful at all:
Here's what he said about family response: "I was speaking with Kristina Anderson. She's a Virginia Tech survivor and she had said to me something that really stuck with me, which is that she felt all this memorabilia, it becomes a huge burden for families and survivors to go through, to catalogue and to store. It felt like it might be more in the service of the person giving, then the people that have actually been through the violence."
Here's what he said about community response: "A lot of the items are sent directly to the families and what I found is a lot of families don't want them. So, they leave them to the city or to the school, and the schools and the cities then spend time collecting them and finding a home for them and archiving them and cataloging them. I was just in Parkland and they had collected 227 boxes worth of mementos and moved them into Florida Atlantic University's library, where they will eventually be catalogued and stored and then digitized and put online. In Sandy Hook they were inundated with so much stuff. They had received over 65,000 teddy bears, over half a million letters, along with quilts and poetry and all the other ephemera that get sent to these sites. At first the city tried to hold it at city hall and it filled up city hall. Eventually they ended up moving it into a small airplane hangar and it filled up the airplane hangar and the city didn't know what to do with it. So the Connecticut State Library created a very small selection that went into the archive, but the majority of it was incinerated."
Here's what he said about family response: "I was speaking with Kristina Anderson. She's a Virginia Tech survivor and she had said to me something that really stuck with me, which is that she felt all this memorabilia, it becomes a huge burden for families and survivors to go through, to catalogue and to store. It felt like it might be more in the service of the person giving, then the people that have actually been through the violence."
Here's what he said about community response: "A lot of the items are sent directly to the families and what I found is a lot of families don't want them. So, they leave them to the city or to the school, and the schools and the cities then spend time collecting them and finding a home for them and archiving them and cataloging them. I was just in Parkland and they had collected 227 boxes worth of mementos and moved them into Florida Atlantic University's library, where they will eventually be catalogued and stored and then digitized and put online. In Sandy Hook they were inundated with so much stuff. They had received over 65,000 teddy bears, over half a million letters, along with quilts and poetry and all the other ephemera that get sent to these sites. At first the city tried to hold it at city hall and it filled up city hall. Eventually they ended up moving it into a small airplane hangar and it filled up the airplane hangar and the city didn't know what to do with it. So the Connecticut State Library created a very small selection that went into the archive, but the majority of it was incinerated."
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