A gunman opened fire outside of a screening of The Dark Knight Rises last night, an unthinkable tragedy in Aurora, Colorado.
If you want to help the community, you can donate to the Colorado Red Cross–follow this link to donate. The Colorado Organization for Victim Assistance (COVA) providing assistance in the tragedy as well.
The Huffington Post has collected more resources for helping the community, including Thrive With Confidence Foundation, the Denver Center For Crime Victims and the Aurora Mental Health Center.
We will use this page to collect ways you can help the victims and community of Aurora, Colorado during this difficult time. If you know of other organizations who will help the city recover, email GalleyCat the information.
Kristiana Almeida from the Red Cross sent this message (her complete note is embedded below): “if people want to donate to help the Red Cross respond to any future large-scale disasters, if if they just want to show their support for the exceptional job our volunteers are doing, they can go to RedCross.com”
At Sporting News, Jesse Spector paid tribute to sportswriter Jessica Redfield, one of the victims of the shooting:
[She] was opinionated about everything, but in a much less obnoxious way than most of us. Her Twitter bio was a perfect example of how snappily yet sweetly she could express herself in just a few words: “You can find me in the TV studio, NHL arena/locker room, on a plane, or writing. Southern. Sarcastic. Sass.Class.Crass. Grammar snob.” Only re-typing that do I notice the Oxford comma, which she had expressed her love for on Thursday afternoon, in our second-to-last exchange on Twitter. How can you not enjoy someone who uses four exclamation points in a punctuation lovefest?
Kristiana Almeida left this message for GalleyCat readers:
My name is Kristiana and I’m from the Red Cross. Thank you so much for showing your support of our organization, because we do have volunteers helping in Aurora. It’s amazing that these volunteers JUST finished a hard round of work with the wildfire, and are now providing exceptional emotional support to those who have been affected by the unspeakable events of last night. They are truly outstanding friends and neighbors in the community.
I just wanted to leave one clarification. As of now, our volunteers are giving out snacks in addition to a lot of hugs, shoulders to cry on, and ears to listen as people try to sort out how something like this could have happened. Luckily, these do not cost the chapter much money, so we’re not looking for donations in response to this specific incident.
However, if people want to donate to help the Red Cross respond to any future large-scale disasters, if if they just want to show their support for the exceptional job our volunteers are doing, they can go to redcross.org.
Again, we cannot thank you enough for thinking of us – our hearts go out to all affected by this and we hope that Colorado can start down the path of healing soon.
CNN has more about the shooting: “A heavily armed gunman tossed tear gas into the darkness of an Aurora, Colorado movie theater Friday and then sprayed the audience with gunfire during an early morning screening of the new Batman movie, killing 12 and wounding 38 others, authorities said.”
Editor’s Note: This post has been updated as we added resources.