His Loved Ones Ran for Their Lives. He’s Running to Help Them Heal.

Jamie Citron’s family survived last year’s Highland Park shooting by sheltering in a gas station for hours. His parents, sister, brother-in-law, niece and nephew were all sitting along the curb, enjoying the Chicago suburb’s annual Fourth of July parade, when a man armed with a semiautomatic rifle fired 83 shots into the crowd, killing seven people and wounding 48 others.

“We were lucky,” Citron tells InsideHook. “But all of them have dealt with trauma [in the 16 months since].”

Citron says he felt a “profound sense of helplessness” after the shooting. He learned about the tragedy while 700 miles away (the 40-year-old now lives in Washington, D.C.), and in the months after, he grappled with the fact that the nation’s incessant specter of mass shootings had finally caught up to his own life. His hometown was forever changed. His family was struggling.

That included his niece, Winnie, who was just four at the time of the shooting. She’d started to equate the very concept of running with terror.

This Sunday, Citron is running the New York City Marathon for Winnie, and for all victims and survivors of mass shootings in this country, under the banner of Team Sandy Hook Promise. We caught up with him to talk about his experience and why he's doing what he's doing.