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Jeanne Assam, woman who shot New Life shooter (and saved many lives), her story (came out as gay):
A few seconds after the first rifle blasts outside New Life Church in Colorado Springs, Jeanne Assam hears the screams. The shots continue outside a set of double glass doors in the snowy parking lot where one person is already dead. The noise gets progressively louder. Glass in one of the doors explodes. Then another.
New Life serves more than 10,000 worshipers each week, and thousands of people are leaving the megachurch following Sunday service on December 9, 2007. Now, some of them are dodging bullets. A wave of panicked churchgoers bears down on Assam’s position near the center of the church—a tentlike colossus rising from the 42-acre campus. Assam, in her second month as a volunteer for the church security team, is more than 100 yards from the exploding doors. Between her and the doorway are multiple hallways and classrooms filling with terrified people. “Jeanne!” a security team member yells behind her. “He’s coming through the doors!”
...
Then, in early 2008, a book agent who was working with Assam accidentally outed her to a New Life pastor. Assam says she was confronted about her homosexuality at church and was told not to write a book about the shooting or her life. It was clear to her that church officials were still stung by the Ted Haggard story. She says New Life officials began to treat her differently. Fellow congregants stopped talking to her; she no longer was given high-profile security details on Sundays. (New Life denies Assam’s claims, and a spokeswoman for the church referred to Assam as a “hero.”) Every time Assam left church, it was as if she’d had a hole burned into her heart.
The decision to leave New Life for good in June 2009 was difficult. She’d been marginalized among those she’d saved less than two years earlier, but she still clung to God and Jesus and to the idea that hope was right over the mountaintop. After she’d shot Murray, she imagined she had climbed the mountain, that she’d completed an assignment and would soon see the rewards. She realized she was nowhere near the end of her journey.
http://www.5280.com/magazine/2012/12/jeanne-assam-still-waiting
New Life serves more than 10,000 worshipers each week, and thousands of people are leaving the megachurch following Sunday service on December 9, 2007. Now, some of them are dodging bullets. A wave of panicked churchgoers bears down on Assam’s position near the center of the church—a tentlike colossus rising from the 42-acre campus. Assam, in her second month as a volunteer for the church security team, is more than 100 yards from the exploding doors. Between her and the doorway are multiple hallways and classrooms filling with terrified people. “Jeanne!” a security team member yells behind her. “He’s coming through the doors!”
...
Then, in early 2008, a book agent who was working with Assam accidentally outed her to a New Life pastor. Assam says she was confronted about her homosexuality at church and was told not to write a book about the shooting or her life. It was clear to her that church officials were still stung by the Ted Haggard story. She says New Life officials began to treat her differently. Fellow congregants stopped talking to her; she no longer was given high-profile security details on Sundays. (New Life denies Assam’s claims, and a spokeswoman for the church referred to Assam as a “hero.”) Every time Assam left church, it was as if she’d had a hole burned into her heart.
The decision to leave New Life for good in June 2009 was difficult. She’d been marginalized among those she’d saved less than two years earlier, but she still clung to God and Jesus and to the idea that hope was right over the mountaintop. After she’d shot Murray, she imagined she had climbed the mountain, that she’d completed an assignment and would soon see the rewards. She realized she was nowhere near the end of her journey.
http://www.5280.com/magazine/2012/12/jeanne-assam-still-waiting
Unbelievable read. I never knew Assam came out as gay and wound up being ultimately ostracized. I found this article when I was telling another DUer about someone who stopped a spree killing.
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