‘That’s finished’

On Aug. 7, 19 months after Jared L. Loughner shot Oceanside native Suzi Annis Hileman and 18 others, including former U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, in front of a Safeway supermarket in Tucson, Ariz., Hileman was sitting in a Tucson courtroom when Loughner pleaded guilty.

Hileman watched as he plead guilty to killing six people and wounding 13 others on Jan. 8, 2011. One of the wounded was Hileman, who was shot three times. Among the dead was Hileman’s young neighbor and friend, Christina Taylor Green, the 9-year-old girl that Hileman brought that day to meet Giffords.

“It was very easy to look at him as ‘the other’ until Tuesday,” Hileman said over the phone from her home in Tucson. “He had a smirk, he had a snarl, he had attitude. He’s been working with the psychologist, Dr. [Christina] Pietz, at the criminal medical facility [in Springfield, Mo.], and she created a human being where there was not one. And that makes it even more awful.”

Loughner made a plea bargain with prosecutors: In exchange for pleading guilty to the shooting, other charges against him would be dropped. The state also took the death penalty off the table. But Loughner, 23, will spend the rest of his life in prison.

Hileman said she was glad that he wasn’t getting the death penalty, as she didn’t want to be associated with the death of another person like that. “I’m not that crazy about being attached to a 23-year-old spending the rest of his life living in a box,” she said. “But I don’t know what the alternative is. He can’t be walking on the street. It’s just very, very sad.”

One of Loughner’s bullets struck Hileman in the hip, shattering it. Since then, it has taken long, painful months of physical therapy to get her back to where she was before the attack: hiking most days during the week and tending to her garden.

“I’m not where I want to be, but I’m further than where I was,” she said. “I’ve gone on short hikes, and I know that longer ones are in the future.”

She no longer needs a walker, and walking around her house isn’t bad. But when she knows she’s going to be on her feet for a while, like when she went to the courthouse, she uses a cane. “It’s more like a third leg,” she said.

Hileman has also been working on a program that honors the memory of the special relationship she had with Christina, and helping other people create something similar.

Called Grandparents in Residence (GRIN), it’s an inter-generational mentoring program that Hileman created to “promote, support and create opportunities for interactions between those who have time and those who have need.” The organization, run entirely by Hileman, has 70 volunteers who donate their time to schools in the Tucson area. And though it involves a lot of paperwork, Hileman doesn’t mind.

“I don’t mind the back-office stuff,” she said. “Like my husband says, as long as it’s an excuse to buy stationery, I’m good to go.”

GRIN is the next chapter in Hileman’s life, following the one in which her “naïve innocence” was taken in front of that supermarket. Loughner’s sentencing was the last part of that horrific experience.

“That’s it. That’s finished,” she said with sadness in her voice. “And now it’s a matter of continuing to make the world the kind of place that Christina imagined it. And that’s my job.”