Jeanne Assam - One Year Later

On Dec. 9, 2007 Jeanne Assam was forced to shoot Matthew Murray after he killed two sisters at the New Life Church in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Once shot and cornered, Murray turned his violent rage on himself. With her valiant actions, Ms. Assam ended a murderous crime spree that took the lives of four people in two cities.

She found herself an instant focal point in a debate over the legitimacy of concealed carry for collective defense. She was an armed citizen to be taken down by the Brady Campaign, painted as a security guard by the mainstream media, and the darling of internet gun forums. Through it all, she remained a quiet, introspective person. A year later, in this article, she reflects on the action she was forced to take. "He didn't start off to be mixed up and confused," Assam said of Murray. "He started off to be a good person but he went down a wrong path."

While watching the children's Sunday school area, Assam heard shots in the parking lot, and then saw Murray coming down the hall with a rifle. "I saw him, it seemed like the halls cleared out, and I saw him coming through the doors, and I took cover. I waited for him to get closer, I came out of cover, and I identified myself. I engaged him and I took him down," Jeanne Assam said at a news conference afterwards. Jeanne Assam fired 10 shots from 63 feet away. She hit the gunman once in the wrist and twice in the leg. Unable to continue his rampage, Murray then committed suicide.

"I don't feel bad about what I had to do," Assam says today. "I'm sad that people died. I wouldn't hesitate to do it again. It still feels a little surreal for me for some reason."

The Remaking of Jeanne Assam

It seems the mainstream media has a hard time accepting the idea that a concealed weapons carrier can stop a massacre in progress. I'm not surprised. Even though the pastor of the New Life Church explained the position of his members who carry handguns in church, the media continues to portray Jeanne Assam as a security guard. She wore no uniform. She received no pay. She worshiped there by choice. Her only duty was to God, her fellow parishioners, and to her own conscience. She was a private citizen with a gun, not a hired security guard.

More recently, not being able to acknowledge the fact that a private citizen in the right place with a gun and the readiness necessary to use it effectively put an end to what police and gun free zones could not, the mainstream media has sought to discredit Ms. Assam. By digging up skeletons in her past, they are painting her as a disgraced police officer. A decade ago, Jeanne Assam was terminated by her superiors from the Minneapolis police force for not being truthful during an internal investigation.

Sgt. Jesse Garcia, a Minneapolis police spokesman, said Jeanne Assam worked at the department from March 1993 to November 1997. She was fired for lying during an internal investigation. Sgt. John Delmonico, president of the Police Officers Federation of Minneapolis, said police were investigating a complaint that Assam swore at a bus driver while she was handling an incident on a city bus.

"In giving a statement about the incident, she was untruthful and she was fired," Delmonico said. The swearing was caught on tape, he said. "The union arbitrated the case and the arbitrator upheld the termination."

They say nothing, absolutely nothing about Sgt. Jesse Garcia's hand in the publication of Ms. Assam's private personnel file.

It is not uncommon after a shooting for the righteous survivor to be reviled by the ignorant. Friends may ostracize the survivor. Relatives may disassociate with them. People whisper behind their back at church and in check-out lines at the supermarket. Rumors circulate. Reputations become tarnished. Old bones are examined by the ignorant trying to find the difference between the survivor and other people. Here's a tip for those who want to know the difference...........There is none. None. The righteous survivor is just like you, or me. They are a person struggling with day to day life, who managed to survive through their own determination to persevere and live and perhaps save a few others in the process. What the ignorant fail to realize is the righteous survivor of a lethal encounter was an unwilling participant in the act of saving their own life or the lives of others. The righteous survivor did not leave home with the intent to kill. It was forced upon them. The righteous survivor did not prepare to kill. They prepared to live.

After a shooting, a righteous survivor goes through much internal turmoil. At the very least they question what they could have done to avoid the event, and if their preparation in any way brought this new and unwanted identity to their lives. At worst they may contemplate and commit suicide. While the legal entanglements are inevitable, the emotional storms of self doubt and questioning are no less imminent.

The media makes their bread and butter by building people up and then tearing them down. Make an icon, then make an outcast. Many people will say the media leads the masses. No. The masses lead the media in the dance of influencing perceptions. If we do not accept the tripe they hawk as truth and reality, they lose their ability to influence. Truth is not on the newspaper pages. Truth is not on the six o-clock report, and it is not on the internet. Truth will be found within ourselves.

We need to stop looking at righteous survivors, people who have lived by regrettably taking the lives of others, as being somehow different. They are human with the same frailties and foibles as the rest of us. They are no different than the person who has faced and survived cancer, a devastating automobile accident, or any other life threatening encounter. They took action and they lived. The morbid curiosity of dark and unknown places that threaten us, that inner fear of our own immortality within each of us, should not compel us to harm another person while they are at their most vulnerable, assimilating a new, inescapable conception of themselves, and trying to rebuild their life from the confusing aftermath of a righteous shooting.

The Persistance of Denial

Jeanne Assam's Story

You never know when it's going to happen. Violence will never be removed from human society. Even if all firearms were banned, violence will still erupt. Vermin who seek to force their will on others, or to inform the world of their pathetic and pathological pleas for attention as they remove themselves from their own misery, will need to be dealt with. They will need to be dealt with swiftly, surely, and with the greatest of regard towards the safety of those whom they threaten.

Jeanne Assam may not have thought it was her day to be called upon as she got ready to go to Sunday service in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Never the less, she armed herself with her handgun. Jeanne Assam was granted a concealed carry permit by her state government, a right to self preservation that should be indisputably guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution. Over the years, this right had been eroded by ill guided thinking and politics, but in the past decade the right to keep and bear arms had made a resurgence. Jeanne Assam took advantage of new laws that gave her greater options to defend her own life as well as the lives of others. Because she is a community oriented individual, Jeanne Assam also was willing to place her life at risk to prevent the killing of innocents.

Twelve hours earlier, Matthew Murray had slain two people at a missionary training center, Youth with a Mission, sixty five miles away. Murray was still at large. Ms. Assam was aware of that fact, but that is not why she carried a gun. Jeanne Assam may have strapped a Glock under her jacket. She may have placed a .38 snubbie into her purse. The handgun and her mode of carry really does not matter. Ms. Assam says she was weak from a three day religious fast as she left her home on December 9, for the New Life Church. She had not slept since learning of the previous shootings. She was not weak though. She was not armed with only a handgun. She was armed with the will to use the handgun in the defense of herself and others. Her body may have felt weak, but her conviction and determination was resolute. Along with the pistol, that would be enough.

The wolf violently invaded the flock before Jeanne Assam arrived on the scene. Stephanie and Rachael Works lay dying. Their father, David Works, and Judy Purcell were wounded. A Vietnam combat veteran, Larry Bourbonnais, had found himself unarmed facing the murderer's fury. Two armed security guards, with guns drawn, were frozen, facing an unchecked killer, not acting. Bourbonnais pleaded with one of the men to relinquish his firearm so that a man with the will to kill might be able to persevere against overwhelming and deadly force. The armed man did not respond, continuing to hold a drawn handgun on a frenzied psychopath as though it were some talisman against evil.

Armed only with words, Mr. Bourbonnais used what he had. "First, I called him 'Coward' then I called him 'Shithead.' I probably shouldn't have been saying that in church," said Mr. Bourbonnais told the Denver Post. The gunman turned his assault on Bourbonnais, who survived only by finding concealment behind a non-metaphorical hollow, decorative pillar. Bourbonnais was struck in the arm.

Then another pillar appeared. Not a decorative one, this pillar was a pillar of immutable strength. Jeanne Assam entered the church hallway, approaching the deranged killer, demanding that he surrender....Now. The wolf turned a handgun on the approaching sheepdog. He managed to fire off three shots. Jeanne Assam responded with conviction and courageous determination to live and save others from death as she continued to close on the killer, firing off shot after shot into his body, emptying her gun and putting an end to his bloody rampage.

"I saw him, it seemed like the halls cleared out, and I saw him coming through the doors, and I took cover. I waited for him to get closer, I came out of cover, and I identified myself. I engaged him and I took him down," Jeanne Assam said modestly at a news conference in the Colorado Springs police station. "I didn't think it was my sole responsibility. I didn't think about this. It was, it seemed like it was, me, the gunman and God."

"I didn't run away, and I didn't think for a minute to run away. I just knew that I was given the assignment to end this before it got too much worse," she said. "I just prayed for the Holy Spirit to guide me. I said, 'Holy Spirit, be with me.' My hands weren't even shaking. Honestly, I was very focused, and it was chaotic and it was so loud. I'll never forget the gunshots. It was so loud. I was just focused and I knew I wasn't going to wait for him to do any further damage. I just knew what I had to do."

Sgt. Jeff Johnson of the Colorado Springs Police Department reported that Matthew Murray was carrying two handguns, a rifle, and close to 1,000 rounds of ammunition. He obviously had plans. Investigators have said that Murray, 24, may have, in fact, died of a self inflicted gunshot wound. Autopsies should be cold and clinical things, based on factual evidence and removed from the shifting sands of human interaction. That is well and good. Murray may have brought about his own end. It is indisputable, however, that his killing spree was brought to an abrupt halt by a woman with steel determination, the will to to preserve lives, and a handgun.



George Orwell once said: "People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf." Sometimes the sheepdog is neither rough, nor a man. That is as it should be. Introduce a woman to shooting today. The life she saves may be your own.

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