By JIEUN HONG

(WARRENSBURG, Mo., digitalBURG) – About 100 people, including UCM students, faculty, staff, alumni and local residents, gathered in the Elliott Student Union June 15 to mourn the death of 49 people at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, June 13.

“Today we had sort of a vigil, a community gathering where people can come together so that we could sort of mourn the loss of life in Orlando and provide a place for people in this community who are having difficulty dealing with that tragedy,” said Amber Clifford-Napoleone, associate professor of anthropology.

The UCM Office of Mentoring, Advocacy and Peer Support and the Office of Student Activities organized the vigil, titled “Standing With Orlando.”

President Charles Ambrose talked about Steve Tomlinson’s son, Shane. Ambrose first met Tomlinson during Ambrose’s presidency at Pfeiffer University. The shooting took Shane’s life.

“Shane was at Pulse Saturday night and Shane’s life was taken,” Ambrose said. “I cannot imagine his pain. I know Shane had aspirations, I know he had hopes…and Shane is not here.”

Ambrose said violence and hate cannot be tolerated.

Six individuals shared their thoughts during the vigil, including a woman who lost friends in the shooting — a Muslim, a transgender individual and a mother who has an LGBTQ daughter.

Sasha Fuller, an eighth-grade student from Warrensburg Middle school, said love is love and people who are not LGBT, Muslim or Latino do care about these communities.

“They find solace in things like this and they want to support us, they want us to be happy and that is a really big thing for me,” Fuller said.

Clifford-Napoleone said this shooting was not the first during her lifetime.

“There’s been bombing at gay bars, there’s been arson at gay bars. They’ve been attacked many times in our history and a lot of those bombing and shootings and arsons happened in my lifetime,” Clifford-Napopleone said. “So when I first heard about it, what it brought up was all of this old fear and hurt and worry because I had seen those things happen before.”

She said she got frightened very quickly after she heard of this shooting.

“So it feels much closer than you would assume,” she said. “Because just as some of our speakers mentioned, the first thing that my brain did was ‘It could have been me.’”

Clifford-Napopleone said if anyone needs to talk, needs help or is looking for a community to be a part of, they can contact the MAPS office on campus.

“They’re sort of the clearinghouse for all of those minority groups of people to come together and get assistance and make connections,” she said.

For more information, visit www.ucmo.edu/maps/.