Discussing the NY Meet & Greet ending early

CharlieBear

Hello everyone. I want to thank you again for your patience as those of us that attended the New York meetup process the event that took place.

For anyone unaware, during our meetup, a man unassociated with our group had pulled out a handgun and began firing into a group of gentleman that had taken refuge under our pavilion while it rained. We later found that the gunman was targeting a specific person in that group, so we can at least take a little bit of comfort in knowing that we were not caught up in an active shooter situation, which is certainly what I thought was the case at the time.

This unfortunately brought our meetup to an abrupt end and left many attendees that were still making their way to the meetup left in the dark as to why they couldn’t enter the park, and it also caused concern in our online community as people understandably wanted to know what happened and to make sure everyone was alright. This is a new one for us on the moderation team and the admin side and hopefully something we never have to revisit.

I’m making this thread separate from the meetup thread so we can share our experience of what happened. Anyone that is comfortable sharing what they experienced, please feel free to do so.

If you do share, PLEASE do not tag or otherwise name anyone from the meetup. I don’t want anyone that attended to be drawn into a conversation that they may not want to be reminded of. Thank you.

CharlieBear

https://nypost.com/2023/04/29/broad-daylight-shooting-in-nyc-leaves-victim-hospitalized/amp/

Here’s my account of what went down:

I was not among the first to arrive at the pavilion, but from what I heard, there was a group of homeless gentleman seeking refuge under the pavilion as it was raining. Once our group arrived, we mentioned having the space reserved so they kindly moved towards the back of the pavilion to allow our group to set up. I mention them because they were respectful of us and sadly ended up being the group that was fired upon by the gunman.

So during the meetup, a younger man (white male, maybe 20’s or 30’s) had walked by our pavilion and began shouting at seemingly no one in particular about something that seemed racially/politically motivated. I tried to ignore him as he passed by since it was just more awkward than anything else. Maybe an hour or so later, he walked by again, this time stopping at the pavilion to express his agitation again. We looked on as he gave his rant and then went on his way leaving us be once again.

Another hour or so passed, it being around 2:30pm now, and I am sitting down bundled up in a blanket trying to keep warm as it was still raining and a bit cold. I was seated closest to the group of gentleman I mentioned earlier with my back to them as I was facing our group watching as the meetup seemed to be in full swing at this point. All of a sudden I heard a loud bang come from somewhere behind me. Our group was startled by this, but I just thought it was a firework someone had set off. Another bang went off and that’s when our group cleared out as fast as they could. I still didn’t know what was going on and thought it might have just been an impulse reaction to a loud noise. I got up from my chair and turned around and saw the man from earlier with a handgun drawn, maybe 15ft-20ft or so away from me, aiming his gun at the group behind me.

The gunman started shouting at them, seemingly unprovoked. He was acting like he was a big man with a gun and that they should be fearing him as he shouted. One of the men from the group being fired upon flipped a table towards the gunman, possibly to put a barrier between them and the gunman, and when I saw that happen I turned and headed towards the front of the pavilion.

I saw one of our members on the phone with the police so I started to move away from the pavilion towards them but then looked back to see what was going on with the gunman. A couple of our group had confronted him and it seemed as if he had put his gun away at this point. I then noticed another of our group trying to get away from the pavilion so I went to help escort them to safety. We made our way down the main path towards a set of stairs that led to the exit of the park.

Unfortunately for us, this was the path the gunman chose to flee the scene, though he was not moving very fast. He did catch up to us though, and me in my infinite wisdom decided to engage in conversation with the gunman, mainly because I didn’t want him to take any more aggression out on us. I asked him if he was firing blanks, and tried to be agreeable as much as I could in the hopes that he’d leave us alone. I managed to distract him though, and he more calmly launched into his rant from earlier, me nodding along like everything he was saying was true, trying to refrain from agitating him any further. He then left us and headed out of the park where he was apprehended shortly after due to another from our group following him and pointing him out to the police as they arrived.

After that, we turned around and headed back to the pavilion. I saw some of our members crouched beside a tree tending to a man that had been shot. The ambulance soon arrived to take the injured man away and the police came and taped off the area. We stuck around to give our statements to the police and then headed home around 4pm.

Iamlegend3200

Godness. What a terrifying ordeal. I can tell you this is not common incidents in that part of Brooklyn.

But it happened.

Glad everyone is ok physically.

And from what I read the person who was shot - was gonna pull through (from news article).

CharlieBear

Yeah I visited Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Staten Island and it was all so much fun. I definitely wouldn’t let something like this ruin my time there. Brooklyn was a really cool place to visit and the park was beautiful (though I didn’t get to see much due to the rain.)

Finnegan2017

Wow, that sounds like it was a terrible ordeal to experience. Glad everyone is OK.

My takeaways from your report is it shows the incredible compassion and humanity in this group. Even during such a traumatic event, people from our group responded to people in need, in regards to both the victim of the shooting and the assailant, who it sounds was experiencing a psychotic break of some sort.

If anyone needs some support to work through their experiences, feel free to reach out.

CharlieBear

I think our group responded amazingly well. I didn’t run like I probably should have, but it allowed me to see so many of us working together handling so many different things at once. I think as far as responses go, we definitely exceeded expectations.

CuddleDuncan

@Charlie_Bear you were right not to run. In fact, listening to the man ranting, paying attention to him, probably helped him. That may have contributed to the police being able to take him into custody without anybody being hurt, and it almost certainly helped to ensure that nobody was hurt as he was leaving the park.

From what you say I am very impressed by the response of the cuddle community. Helping in several different ways.

carrieanne

I’m so sorry that CC members attending the NY meet-up experienced such a terrifying event!

I’m most grateful and impressed with @Charlie_Bear and the others in the CC groups’ quick thinking - knowing how to prevent a much worse ending.

MonkeyNeedsAHug

I don’t hope to get into it with anyone whose recollection differs from mine. But I didn’t draw any conclusions about whether Michael lacked housing or not. And I wonder if including that descriptor in this context might be problematic.

It strikes me as an unconscious attempt to put psychological distance between “us” and “the victim”. After which, it’s an easy leap from “a man was shot in the chest” to “the shooter was taken into custody without anybody being hurt.”

CuddleDuncan

@MonkeyNeedsAHug I suspect you may have misunderstood my remark about "without anybody being hurt". It was bolted firmly to the act of arresting the suspect, during which event nobody was seriously hurt.

KoalaMale_nyc

I wish the victim a full recovery, and to those who witnessed, traumatized by the incident, a full recovery as well!

JoyfulHeart

I wanted to say thank you to everyone who respected our need to take time to process the event. That processing is still going on, and will for some time. Thank you also for the care and concern that has been expressed.

Along with the difficult part, there was the privilege to see members of our community helping one another, and showing compassion to someone outside our community.

There is still goodness in people, and it never hurts to be reminded of that.

Sending hugs!

Lisa123

I wish cuddles and comfort for everyone who was there.

justjennn

Thank you @Charlie_Bear for your perspective. I'm still processing, my girls are still haunted by sirens, running, gunshots, and about a dozen other triggers. It's definitely going to take some time. Thank you, thank you, thank you, ALL of you, for being there to really step up and handle what needed handled.

MrGaurav

This is a lot more terrifying than I initially thought. I didn't realize just how close the shooting was and that an entire group was targeted. All of you showed great courage and I hope you recover soon.

CharlieBear

I feel bad for those of you from NY having to hear that this happened while we visited your city. I mean, what are the chances something like that would happen? It’s crazy to think about. It seems like that park is pretty dang safe too, considering how few instances of this happen there in a city so big. But what matters is that we are safe and the man that was shot is recovering well.

b0nfire

Hi y’all, just wanted to say that I’m just now leaving the courthouse after testifying before the grand jury regarding this tragic event. Having been at the pavilion setting up before the event began and staying to talk to detectives until we were all cleared to go, I felt it was important for me to give testimony. For context, I was sitting next to Charlie_Bear, and I think I’m the member he was talking about being on the phone with 911.

There’s plenty more to say about all of it, but ultimately, I’m just so grateful that nobody in our group was injured. The detectives and the assistant DA I’ve been in contact with have all remarked to me on how kind and helpful everyone in our group was, and how well we handled such an unexpected, terrifying thing. I already knew the cuddle community was amazing, but all of this really drove the truth of that home for me. I am so proud of everyone who was there with us, and so, so sorry that all this happened. I still feel a lot of anger and frustration that this is how so many people in this community ended up experiencing New York for the first time. It’s such an antithetical thing to happen when a group of folks who promote positivity and connection and comfort are gathering to meet and build community. But I can’t say enough how honored I am, before all this went down and certainly here in the aftermath, to be in community with y’all. ♥️

CharlieBear

Yep b0nfire that was you I saw on the phone with 911 🥹

Bear

I’m glad everyone is safe in our family community

StructuredQueryLanguage

I also testified today in Brooklyn, and I want to second what @b0nfire said. The folks here are amazing and went above and beyond to do the rightmost thing.

I pray all works out the best for all involved, and through this adversity, bonds can grow deeper with love ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️.

safensecure4u2

I am happy to hear things are going well with the testimonies. I am happy to know so many of you and how this group has bonded over this. I am frustrated that something like this has the ability to bring back feelings and emotions that have been put away for years. But eventually this will be behind us also. Thank you all for what you do for each other.

PrettyLuv

Im from the area, and you know, like any big city, there’s always something going on, whether you’re witness to it or not.

I was upset to hear about the man that got shot and I hope he’s recovering and is restored to perfect health again.

I’m also happy no one else got hurt but wary of what could have happened if the shooter turned out to be aimless or worse.

Big cities are notorious for some pretty crazy happenings. We don’t have to look too far back in time to see that.

I think if large gatherings are to happen where 50+ people plan to attend, and are literally flying in to take part, there should be some contingency plan in place should something go wrong.

To start, I think every meetup should have a backup location in case the first one falls through. There should be an easy first line of communication to send out an alert to all attendees in the event anything happens both as it’s happening and after, and lastly all lines of communication should remain open on the site itself for all the maybe’s and stragglers who didn’t sign up for the alerts but were planning to attend anyway or show up late. I understand the feelings involved in hushing up and silencing a thread but I don’t think that was the safest response to a potentially volatile and lethal situation. Nor a very comforting one. Especially for those members who maybe did want to talk about it and hash it out as it was happening. What you say and how you comfort one another in the middle of a trauma can sometimes be just as critical, if not more, as what’s said after it’s passed.

I was also saddened to hear about the 2 kids that were in attendance that day who had to witness all that. Although cuddle comfort is a community, at the end of the day, it’s still a community of strangers (getting banned left and right for all kinds of infractions at that), so while I think it’s nice to meet the family, I don’t think children should be present at these public meetups involving strangers where the purpose is essentially to meet other cuddlers. Plus, there’s no stopping a banned member from attending these events either. The TOS requires you be 18+ to sign up and I think going forward and to avoid any unnecessary situations, all attendees should match.

Finally, this might fall into a site suggestion, but I think certain threads should be viewable by members only, similar to having the option to make a profile only viewable to other members, I think such an option should be available for threads like these as well, since the virtual is meeting reality in these cases.

I’m happy everyone else is safe and I hope the girls are okay as well.

TheFunCartel

@PrettyLuv On point with everything in your post especially about the kids.

b0nfire

As one of the organizers, I may be able to shed some light on some of the issues you’ve raised here.

I’ve only lived in New York for two years, but living in Birmingham and Memphis before moving here, I know all too well that this type of violence is devastatingly common and not unique to this city. Nor are things going wrong at events unique to NYC. I can only speak for my own immediate experience, but I feel quite sure that everyone present was thinking about how much worse it could’ve gone and wondering what could’ve been if he were aimless or not only targeting his intended victim. I wish I could say that this was the first violent crime I’ve been witness to, or the first life-threatening emergency I’ve been involved in, but unfortunately that’s not true.

The three organizers planned this event for months, and we went back and forth on how formal it should be, if we felt comfortable collecting contact information beyond the site in order to have mass communication, and we decided against it for several reasons. As this meetup was designed to be casual, unstructured, and a “meet up” in a family-friendly environment like a public park rather than a cuddle-centric event, we felt that collecting sensitive information up front would deter anyone who wanted to drop by and meet members of the community, and we didn’t want to be responsible for managing sensitive data. Also, as this wasn’t an “official” Cuddle Comfort (TM) event, we didn’t have the infrastructure, funding, or personal bandwidth, nor did we feel that we ought to run the event as an officially sanctioned thing. We did consider booking a backup location as a contingency plan, but as the shooting occurred in the exact middle of the event time, and having booked the pavilion in the park in order to host the event there rain or shine, none of us were thinking about shifting the meetup somewhere else. All three organizers, plus the moderator who made the call to pause activity on the thread, were present during the shooting and stepped up to help the victim, usher attendants to safety, and to help apprehend the gunman. All three of us were receiving calls from people who had arrived and were looking for the party but could only find the area police-taped off. I had to repeatedly silence calls while I was talking to detectives, corroborating the timestamp of my 911 call. Even if we did have a designated communications coordinator on site, they would’ve been a witness to the shooting too, and we were all really shaken up. For an unofficial event, we really did have as seamless and efficient of an operation as anyone could’ve asked for, and the way everyone jumped into action to protect each other and the victim in the immediate aftermath would have made me think we all had formal emergency response training.

As for the forum thread being locked, I can say that the moderator who made the choice did so after consulting a group of us who were gathered together speaking to detectives and waiting for investigators to release us from the scene. We unanimously agreed that we needed at least a day to gather ourselves and not to have to fend off speculation and criticism from anyone who wasn’t there. Was it the perfect response? I don’t think there could be any one singular perfect response to any mass trauma. The decision to lock the thread was a protective one agreed to as a group. We now have a specific thread dedicated to discussing the aftermath of the event, which is what we’re doing here.

SuperManCuddles

@b0nfire I agree 💯 Thank you for all that you and the others did, during this tough/unexpected situation.

CharlieBear

@PrettyLuv
By the time I closed the thread, the event was in its final hour. Anyone that was going to be attending at that point would have had the info to get there, and if they didn’t, they shouldn’t have be coming to the park anyway since it had became inaccessible to us. We were also in the middle of giving statements to the police so I wasn’t sure having a thread open discussing an active investigation would have been the best move. I really appreciate the forums here, but as far as dealing with trauma and seeking therapy is concerned, I do not think a public online forum is the best place for that in the immediate aftermath of what we went through. We let people know we were safe on here, and there was another thread open about why we had to end early, but I saw that one started to take a turn and was making people upset, and honestly that was taking a bigger toll on me mentally than the shooting had. It was overwhelming getting hounded by people online as I’m trying to collect my thoughts and process the event that had just taken place. I had a lot of people who were very scared and struggling to deal with what just happened, and while I didn’t particularly care in the moment if the threads were active or not, shutting the conversation down temporarily was, in my opinion, the right move. While it was closed we had attendees testifying before a grand jury so I think it would have been reckless for us to be openly discussing it during that time. We probably should have waited a bit longer actually because members here were still giving their testimony after we opened the threads back up. Regardless, we got a few days to process what happened and here we are now discussing it. If this ever happens again, I would hope they would be awarded the same amount of time to process it in peace.

Edit: I know I’m sounding a bit defensive here and that’s not what I was going for. I appreciate you providing feedback and we are evaluating how to better respond if something like this happens again. It’s not something we have ever had to deal with. Plus I’m just a volunteer mod that started like a month or so ago so this is a big learning experience for me.

Edit 2: On the topic of kids, I felt so incredibly blessed to have gotten to meet them. The biggest highlight of my trip was getting to play a board game I had made for the event with them. I know this isn’t really on the topic of having kids at a meet & greet in general, and I am absolutely heartbroken that they had to experience that, but for me personally, having them there made the meetup an even better experience for me. (I also just love kids when they are as cool as they were.)

AllAboutSoul

@Charlie_Bear , you and everyone else involved have done an incredible job in dealing with a traumatic event that most could never imagine. Unfortunately, it happens in big cities and small towns all over the US. Thankfully, you all helped diffuse a terrible situation from becoming even more tragic. My heart goes out to ALL of you, and I hope everyone gets the help they need to process and get through this without guilt or shame. (Hugs!!!)

PrettyLuv

Just a note: my above comment is aimed at future meetups. What’s done is done. The thread was locked and hidden. There’s nothing to change that. I would hope that wouldn’t happen in the future because irrespective of testimony, the forums are not bound legally to this crime, and are completely voluntary, and if anyone feels what they say may be used against them, they can just as easily recuse themselves from the conversation. Not everyone that attended or was going to attend gave testimony that day so there’s no reason to muzzle everyone under the same umbrella and even if they did, they were bystanders to a crime. The only people who should be worrying about their testimony and actions that day are those who committed it. There’s no reason to criminalize yourself or anyone else for that matter or wrap others into a fear of speaking about a situation they were witness to just because some gave testimony on it. The testimony will be there whether you open the forums now or a week from now. Unless we all somehow signed a Non-Disclosure Agreement, everyone is free to speak as freely as they choose about what happened. And again, if you feel your story will somehow change between ‘writing in a forum’ and ‘testimony time,’ you either a. Shouldn’t be giving testimony or b. Can recuse yourself from the conversation entirely. But shutting others off from being able to comfort others, check on friends, offer condolences, and speak on what happened is a violation of other members here and completely inconsiderate of their feelings and desire to talk it through. Not to mention, hiding an entire thread out of fear over ones testimony while people are still on their way to the event and unaware of what even happened.

This site may not be a place for working through trauma but when members are actively in the middle of it, we don’t have to act as a catalyst in furthering it.

I don’t think anyone anticipated what would happen or the response, but now that we see what happened and we see the response we could mitigate whatever we can so future meetups are safer.

I think the organizers did an excellent job, particularly Sass & Happybear, and my comment and the one before it, is certainly not a digg at them by any means.

What my comments are meant for is how to move forward to make future meetups safer and make future responses to it less traumatic on the community. Some of us may not have been present at the time this occurred, yes, but it’s still left an impression and obviously had an impact on all. As a member I’d think anyone would want to ensure if something like that happened again we’d be a little more prepared.

@bonfire - this is why I mentioned an “easy” line of communication where the headache and logistical stress of getting contacts is not the organizers responsibility but perhaps a 3rd party apps responsibility. So that’s it’s anonymous still on both the front and back end. I believe there’s apps that do these kind of alerts so that organizers don’t collect anyone’s sensitive information themselves. People just text a number to sign up for alerts from the organizer and alerts get mass distributed to those that opted in. This way it’s still officially “unofficial” and easy on everyone.

@Charlie_Bear - nothing personal.

CharlieBear

The thread was not closed because of the investigation. That was my just my thought after the fact. Also we didn’t prevent anyone from discussing it beyond the meet & greet thread and one other. I closed the thread at the request of the organizers that made it, and hid the thread that started to get out of hand. @Sideon I’d like to request you take over this part of the conversation because honestly I’m really having difficulty dealing with this aspect of this and I need to step away for a bit. Thank you.

Spud424

I am still relatively new to the community but I was reallytouched by how kind and helpful everybody I met was. Having a disability that makes walking anything but relatively small distances difficult…I was so grateful for the person who helped me up to get out of the pavilion and to the others who assisted me as well. I think because I have faced emergency situations before I didn’t get as upset as others did, but that is ok. Everybody handles trauma and crisis differently. But aside from the incident I have very fond memories of the day and I feel blessed to be associated with such a wonderful group of people 🙂

IsMeArrggh

I’m really sorry you all went through that. Gladly everyone is ok. 💝