By William Smith
It wasn’t supposed to happen.
When West Burlington Pool General Manager Bethany Nannen heard a single gunshot in the West Burlington pool parking lot, she thought it was fireworks.
She never thought a man had been shot in the parking lot. Not until she looked outside.
“When we had the debrief, I told the kids (lifeguards), ‘This is something you should never have to witness. I am sorry that you have to go through this. This is not normal, and this is not something that will ever be normal,’ ” she said of the June 14 shooting incident.
Nannen and her team of lifeguards, all between the ages of 14 and 19, became heroes that day. Nannen rushed to the parking lot with a med-kit in her hand while the pool staff calmly got everyone out in an orderly evacuation. At first, Nannen feared a child had been shot.
“At the time, we didn’t know what was happening. We didn’t know if it was another mass shooting. We didn’t know,” she said.
Nannen, a Burlington Community School District teacher, fell back on 30 years of emergency training. She went to the side of the man who had been shot.
A person on the scene was applying pressure to the victim’s gunshot wound with a towel, doing their best to keep him alive. But the pressure was applied to the man’s jaw rather than his neck.
“I knew from what I could see on his face that the wound I did not need to worry about was this one,” she said, gesturing at her jaw.
“It was this one back here,” she said, pointing to the back of her neck.
Nannen felt bad about what she had to do next. But there was no other choice.
“I scooped the towel and applied pressure as hard as I could to the back of his head. And he was not real happy with me at the time because it hurt. I did apply pressure and waited until the ambulance and EMS got there. I tried to keep talking to him and make sure I kept him conscious,” Nannen said.
Word of the shooting quickly spread at the pool, but the scene stayed orderly.
Nannen commended her staff, 15 of which were working that day. She directed some of them to break up the crowd gathering outside the pool.
“I cannot tell you enough good things about my staff. And these are all really young kids. The oldest one I have on staff is 19, and she just turned 19,” Nannen said.
The day was blistering hot, and the pavement was even worse. Nannen and others on the scene tried to keep the victim cool with water, placing towels on him to shade him against the sun.
“All he wanted to do was stand up, and I was like, ‘Oh honey, you can’t stand up yet,” Nannen said. “My knees and feet were scalding hot.”
Nannen’s heart goes out to the children who could see through the chain-link fence into the parking lot.
“The community has been great, thank goodness. They have been so gentle,” she said. “It was very traumatic for those kids who were there. That was very hard for the kids on the other side of the fence.”
The pool reopened Friday, June 17, and Nannen hasn’t had time to process what happened. But she will, eventually.
“I know that it’s not OK. I know that I’m not OK. And I’m OK with that. I know that I’m going to need time, and I’m going to need to be gentle with myself and take care of myself as well,” she said.