AURORA, IL — At 1:24 p.m. on Friday, Feb. 15, Terra Pinkard received a text from her husband, Josh, who working his shift at Henry Pratt Manufacturing. “I love you I’ve been shot at work,” the text read. Hours later, Terra’s worst fears were confirmed when she found out her husband, the father of their three young children, had been killed in the mass shooting in Aurora, she wrote on Facebook.
“It took me several times reading it for it to hit me that it was for real,” Pinkard wrote. She frantically tried to contact him by phone before calling the Henry Pratt plant. “I called his plant and a lady answered and said she was barricaded in her room and police were everywhere,” she said.
Her “heart dropped” and she gathered her three children together to drive to the scene of the shooting, then to a nearby hospital and another nearby hospital before she contacted Aurora police and was given information about a unification of victims at Aurora University.
“I don’t know how my body drove itself there but it did. The police told us there were fatalities. He read my husband’s name. I immediately left and went to get my kids,” she wrote.
“I told my children their dad did not make it and is in heaven with Jesus. I’ve never had to do something that hard.”
Pinkard wrote that Josh was the person she would have turned to in the face of a tragedy like this:
Click Here: Fjallraven Kanken Art Spring Landscape Backpacks
“I want to shout from the rooftops about how amazing Josh was! He was brilliant! The smartest person I’ve ever met! My best friend! The man I would have leaned on during devastation like this who would tell me it’s OK Terra, it is all going to be fine. The man who was dying and found the clarity of mind for just a second to send me one last text to let me know he would always love me.”
A GoFundMe has been set up to help Terra and her family in the wake of Josh’s death.
GoFundMe is a Patch Promotional Partner.
Image via GoFundMe