DAYTON — Today marks seven years since a man shot and killed nine people outside a bar in the Oregon District, and the lives lost are not forgotten.
Megan Betts, Monica Brickhouse, Nicholas Cumer, Derrick Fudge, Thomas McNichols, Lois Oglesby, Saeed Saleh, Logan Turner and Beatrice Warren-Curtis.
News Center 7’s Taylor Robertson talked with a local artist who created a memorial to keep their memories alive.
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Terry Welker, lead artist of Seed of Life Memorial in the Oregon District, said, “We thought about the idea of the seed of life because it comes from sacred geometry, and we knew that it had the potential for being something more than just an object.”
Just a few blocks down from where the 2019 mass shooting happened, Welker said a team of local artists spent more than a year creating a place to honor the victims.
“Jess McMillian, Mosaic artist, James Pate, African American famous artist here in town and Sierra Leone, who was our city’s poet laureate,” Welker said.
Their goal was to create a space where the community can come together, where people can mourn, and the names of the people Conner Betts killed stay permanently engraved in their community.
“The sculpture has nine, what we call, seeds that look a little bit like flames of life, and so nine of them represent the nine victims that were lost that day,” Welker said.
More than 5,000 community volunteers played a role in building the space, detailing the concrete, the garden and the sculpture itself.
“Everybody that we worked with was sometimes just dealing with the loss of these nine victims, but also personal loss through their lives, and so they were remembering their own lives and families while thinking about and empathizing, sympathizing with the families that lost these people,” Welker said.
He continued, “Our hearts are with those people. We know that time heals to a certain degree. This memorial was created with the idea that it would be something that would be not just for the short term, but for the 5,000-plus volunteers that are participating in doing this. They have stories that they’ll share for generations about their participation.”
Welker hopes that what people take from this memorial is that even in devastating losses, there is still hope and community.
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