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A year after the Grand Blanc church shooting, survivors cling to faith as memory haunts them
_“Let us seek out some desolate shade and there weep our sad bosoms empty.” — From “_ Macbeth _”_
The man who came to kill them for their beliefs one year ago unleashed shock and confusion on 215 Latter-day Saints when he rammed his GMC Sierra pickup into the front wall of their chapel in Grand Blanc, Michigan.
The wall buckled. The secured rows of choir chairs in front of it crunched forward in the middle. In the pews, the people were too stunned to move. Nobody knew what was happening. Many thought a bomb had gone off beyond the wall. One man thought it was a gas line explosion. A girl wondered if it was an earthquake.
A few sprang to action before the truth arrived, before the attacker entered the building. A middle school math teacher with active shooter training was one of the first. She stood up and turned to her three daughters and the neighborhood friend they had brought with them. “Go!” she said. When she reached the end of her row and turned up the aisle, she spoke to those around them. “Run!” she said. “Run!” Some jolted from their shock, but Dawn Sheik wanted everyone to flee with her, so she tried one more time.
“Run!”
An ER doctor ran into a burning Grand Blanc church again and again
“That saved us,” Rick Brooks said.
Bishop Jeffrey Schaub stepped to the microphone to add his own urgent message. “Everybody,” he said, “go out the back doors.”
Four members of the church died, and it is important to Grand Blanc church members that you know their names up front — Thelma Armstrong, 54; John Bond, 77; Craig Hayden, 72; William “Pat” Howard, 77. “They’re the heroes,” one ward member told the Detroit News, “and they deserve to be remembered.”
Those calls by Sheik and Schaub became part of a remarkable tapestry of widespread faith and action that saved more than 200 lives. The entire Grand Blanc Ward snapped into survival mode during eight minutes of knee-buckling terror. The reality is that shutting off that state of mind is still a work in progress 365 days later.
The survivors said they have faced guilt and have played it over and over again, wondering what they might have done differently, done better. They want you to understand that after coming under fire, healing isn’t easy or linear. They remain haunted. They have looked in the eye life’s greatest questions: Why do bad things happen to good people? Where is God in a tragedy? Am I safe?
But a year later, in telling their stories, the healing continues. “Heavenly Father doesn’t take away agency,” Katie Brooks said. “This wasn’t going to be stopped, so what he did is send his army to protect us. We obviously lost four amazing people who are the most gentle giants ever, but I am also amazed that only four of a congregation that big died with the sheer amount of gunfire and the fire. It’s a miracle.”
The one-year anniversary brought back terrifying memories when it arrived Monday.
On Sept. 28, 2025, Thomas Jacob Sanford rammed a vehicle into the Grand Blanc chapel of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, began shooting and set the building on fire. In addition to the four Latter-day Saints who died in the attack, eight others were wounded. Sanford was shot and killed by responding officers.
It’s difficult to recall the day malevolent evil shattered their peaceable worship. Tears came quickly during interviews with survivors. The many Latter-day Saints who spoke for this story generously described journeys that include panic attacks, therapy sessions and needed human connection. They have taught each other to speak carefully about what happened, what they did and how they feel. It is how they respect and love each other’s own experiences and their variable healing processes.
Sheik felt the horror rush back a week ago during a daughter’s soccer game when a hunter fired a rifle in the nearby woods. She stared off across her living room as she described her quest for normalcy and healing.
“There were definitely days at the beginning where it felt like it was never gonna get done,” she said. “The best way to describe it is a roller coaster. You have good moments and bad moments. At the beginning, the hills on the roller coaster are steep. As you get farther away, the hills aren’t quite so big and the dips aren’t quite so low, but you still have bad days.”
But the anniversary also brought real and welcomed symbols of healing. On Sunday, a man who recovered from three gunshots to the chest conducted the music during the ward’s fast-and-testimony meeting in Flint, not far up an old Chippewa trail that became I-75.
In the evening, ward members returned together for the first time to the now-empty lot the stake president calls a sacred site. Monday night, church leaders will turn over fresh soil at a groundbreaking ceremony. The church is rebuilding. A new stake center will rise from the ashes of the one that burned.
“God has been with us from the very beginning until today, and we’re here to rebuild with his help,” said Grand Blanc Stake President Marcelino Sanchez.
“There’s no better source of happiness and peace than our Lord, Jesus Christ,” Schaub said. “We’ve come out stronger.”
This is the story of how the Grand Blanc Latter-day Saints are looking for the beauty in ashes that symbolize the violation of their peaceful worship and security.
### The chaos begins
September in Grand Blanc is glorious, a time for local apple cider with cinnamon sugar doughnuts. Fall begins to color lovely forests around the lakes of a sprawling rural-suburban area. It’s obvious why the Chippewa made this a major summer campground before the French trappers and pioneers arrived.
The sun sweetened a perfect morning as the Grand Blanc Ward began its fast-and-testimony meeting on Sept. 25, 2025. Eleven-year-old Lincoln Brooks remembers that the chapel was unusually bright. The only concern was smelly fumes from new carpeting. Katie Brooks and Becky Anderson were among those who thought the windows and doors should be opened.
After the sacrament service, a handsome young father serving in the bishopric stood to share the meeting’s first testimony. “Sometimes,” Ben Hougaboom was saying, “tender mercies and miracles happen in ways you don’t expect.”
Then the truck crumpled the wall behind him.
The worst day of their lives began to unfold for Rick and Katie Brooks and their three children. When they needed each other the most, Rick Brooks was separated from his family in the chaos of exiting the chapel. Soon, they all would be doing unimaginable things. He would be running through the creek behind the building. She would be holding a metal chair up to a window to shield their children from possible gunfire as black smoke filled the room where they hid.
Sheik would literally pile 15 people, including two gunshot victims, into her seven-passenger van in their attempt to escape.
Becky and Chris Anderson hid behind a tipped-over piano bench alone in the vast Primary room, scared to make a sound. Their daughter Lisa, at church in Virginia, saw the first images of the building on fire and collapsed into the arms of a friend. Their son Jacob said he felt helpless at his church in Pennsylvania.
“These were people who were instrumental to our childhood,” he said. “Bishop Hayden sent me on my mission. All we could do was sit and wait for the names of those who died.”
### Questioning themselves
Sheik began to beat herself up before she got her girls and their friend out of the chapel. Her 16 years as a teacher made her a veteran of ALICE training — Alert, Lockdown, Inform, Counter, Evacuate. That informed her calls for people to run. At first she couldn’t understand why people weren’t moving, but now she knows many were. She has learned — they all have learned — that trauma plays tricks on your mind.
Time warps. Some senses go out. Others are heightened. It can be like looking at the distorted images of a funhouse mirror. It also plays havoc with emotions.
Sheik felt embarrassed as she ran out of the chapel with the four girls in tow and turned to run down the back hallway. “Like maybe I was overreacting,” she said. Maybe it was nothing.
The first gunshots transformed those thoughts. Embarrassment turned to panic. She yelled at the girls to get to their car. Her oldest daughter jumped in the front passenger seat. Sheik hit the key fob to open the automatic sliding door, but when she hit the ignition, the door stopped opening and shut again. It was maddening, but Sheik now sees angels at work where then she felt only fear. Her oldest grabbed the three other girls and piled them on top of her in the front seat. It is a critically important detail. It created room to fit 10 more people in the back.
Five teenagers appeared. The back door obediently slid open this time. Then a family of five arrived, two of them with gunshot wounds. One was Jared Hicken, an ER doctor struck in the thigh. His 5-year-old daughter, Piper, had been hit in the back.
Now Sheik, a counselor in the ward’s Primary presidency, needed to make smart decisions. Driving around the front of the church to get to the road risked a confrontation with the shooter. She asked Jared Hicken if they needed to go to the hospital. “Not now, but soon,” he said. She told Brandi Hicken to put pressure on her husband’s wounds and told Jared to call 911. She rolled down the windows to listen for gunshots when she heard someone say, “Go to the woods.” It may have been Bishop Schaub, who told children milling around to seek safety of the trees.
So Sheik drove the van through a small opening behind the stake center. As they entered the woods, she saw people hiding and parked her car broadside to the church to protect them.
One of her first text messages was to the mother of the girl her daughters took with them to church that day. “Our church was attacked. Your daughter is safe,” she wrote.
“Wait,” the mom replied, “attacked how?”
Sheik feels blessed that she harbors no anger toward their attacker, but she wonders at his hatred for them.
“There’s so much misinformation out there about what we believe that people can kind of fixate and make up their own stories,” she said. “A lot of people believe we aren’t Christians, but even if we weren’t Christians, nobody should ever have to worry about getting attacked for their beliefs.”
Sheik is clearly a hero, but she doesn’t feel heroic. She has spent a lot of time thinking she could have done more. She’d prefer not to talk about it, but she agreed for one reason.
“It’s important for girls and women to hear other women’s stories,” she said.
### A counterattack buys time
Time still doesn’t make sense for Rick Brooks, a tax accountant who lives in nearby Linden, Michigan. One moment, he was leading his family out of the chapel. Then the next, they were gone. He paused for a just second when he saw the shooter in khaki camo outside through the glass doors, but when he looked back for his wife and children, they had vanished. He didn’t see them run past him and down a hallway.
Guilt over that separation haunted him later, but when he turned into the dark gym and then made his way through the pitch-darkness of the stage and out a back door of the building he grew up in and knew like the back of his hand, a young man from the ward followed him. The boy’s mother credits his safety as the purpose the Brooks family was meant to split up.
All of them may have survived because the shooter faced a courageous member of the ward before he could enter. Greg Mikat, a hearings investigator for the Michigan Department of Corrections, was carrying his handgun that morning; church policy allows only law enforcement officers to bring weapons to meetings. Mikat went through the foyer doors with others trying to figure out what had happened to the back wall when they saw their attacker headed for the doors.
None of Mikat’s five shots hit Sanford, according to the police investigation, but “Greg Mikat is a hero, in my opinion,” Grand Blanc Township Police Chief William “Bill” Renye told the Deseret News. “What bravery and courage to go out there when your firearm is a lot smaller than a rifle. If anything, he bought time for most of the people in the ward to run out the back and take shelter.”
Sanford shot Mikat three times in the chest. He is the one who, on Sunday, stood before the ward and conducted the music. He quietly embodied stability. Mikat has served in that calling for years and years.
### Tackling their children
Without Rick Brooks, Katie Brooks led her three children down a hallway by herself. Suddenly, her body heated up and she heard a deep male voice say, “Katie! No!” She tackled her daughter Kennedy, a Grand Blanc High School student who is now a freshman at BYU. Brooks knocked down her now 12-year-old son Lincoln in the process, and then she directed them into a small room. They were followed by the oldest child, Reagan, a Bowling Green State University student now at BYU.
Another mother with two smaller children was already inside. The seven decided to barricade themselves in, but when they started to move a metal chair, it made an unholy racket. The other mother volunteered to be a human barricade and lay herself on floor in front of the door so it would be hard to open. Katie Brooks heard gunfire outside, so she held up a metal chair as a shield between the window and the five children in the room.
“We had no idea the number of shooters,” said Katie Brooks, a U.S. Postal Service carrier. “It sounded like there was gunfire on the other side of the door and the other side of the window.”
She called 911 but got a recording. Rick Brooks’ mother, who was there with his father, called to ask if they were alive. She told her they were but weren’t with Rick Brooks. When she called 911 back, she got through and started to supply information quietly.
Then black smoke began to pour into the little room from a vent above the door. It was the blackest smoke Katie had ever seen. The 911 operator told her to take everyone out the window, but then gunfire erupted again. The women directed the children to pour water from a bottle on their clothes and cover their mouths with the wet fabric. One of the other mother’s children lay on top of the other to protect her. They all pressed their faces to the floor. Lincoln said seven prayers. Soon, the room was nothing but solid black smoke.
### A mother’s unspeakable decision
Katie Brooks confronted an impossible question for a mother as she listened to kids screaming outside their room. What is worse for my children, to die by fire or gunfire? Just then, the operator told her police had arrived. It was time to go out the window, but it made another terrible sound. Fortunately, first responders heard it and flung the window open. Katie Brooks grabbed Lincoln and threw him out the window, banging him up good. The other mother’s two children were next, then Kennedy and Katie.
But Reagan Brooks didn’t appear. It turned out the grandmother of the other children had been in an adjacent room. She had come through an adjoining door with her walker and a man who had been shot in the lower leg. The other mother had refused to leave without her own mother, and Reagan Brooks stayed until they were out.
Miracles pile up as Katie Brooks talks. Reagan, whose lungs are compromised by cystic fibrosis, suffered no complications from the smoke, even though she and the rest of the family were covered in so much black soot that they coughed it up, washed it out of their eyes with drops and it came out of their noses when they showered later.
Meanwhile, Rick Brooks had led the other boy to safety in the woods and crossed the creek out back to circle around to go back for his family. As he did, he saw police and knew he would live but thought he wouldn’t see his family again in this life. It made him more grateful for the Latter-day Saint doctrine of eternal families.
“We were sure he was dead,” Katie Brooks said. “I was sure I was a widow. I didn’t know how I was going to handle this.”
Suddenly Lincoln yelled, “It’s dad!”
Katie Brooks said her husband looked rough. His pants had snags and pieces of sticks and thorns stuck in them from running through the brush. His shoe was missing a small piece where shrapnel hit the bottom of his foot while he ran through the gym. Rick could see the soot and smell the smoke on his family.
“I don’t think any of us have ever cried tears so painful,” Katie said. “We were happy he was alive, but we were overwhelmed. That’s the most broken I’ve ever seen my children.”
### ‘We were going to die, and that was OK’
Becky Anderson was one of those who didn’t sit still. “I was propelled out of my seat,” she said. “I was the first or second person to jump up. A voice in my head said, ‘Run!’” As she and Chris Anderson, who are in their 60s, left the chapel, he saw the shooter. Their training as BYU-Pathway missionaries pushed them to find a place to hide until police could arrive. Chris Anderson grabbed Becky’s arm and said, “Hide!”
They ducked in to the Primary room, where they found a woman preparing for the next hour’s class for the ward’s children. The young mother’s husband was home with their two children because one was sick. She grabbed her bag and keys and climbed out a window while the Andersons tipped over the piano bench for cover.
Those wildly different decisions were each right, the Andersons said. Rick Brooks agreed.
“Everybody made different decisions that day, but everyone made the right decisions that day,” Brooks said. “The Spirit was leading us where we needed to be.”
“Our roles were different,” Becky Anderson said. “That mother very clearly knew she should go home. I heard a male voice tell us we should pray.”
They could hear the shooter outside the room, but she began to whisper a prayer. The Holy Spirit guided her to ask for protection for the children. Chris followed in his own whisper, and he was prompted to pray for the safety of the first responders.
Suddenly, they heard an explosion they believe was the ignition of the fire Sanford set in the chapel.
“We were going to die, but it was OK,” Becky Anderson said.
Then they heard the first responders confront Sanford outside, where they shot and killed him right by the Andersons’ car.
“Our impression was not to go to our car,” Chris Anderson said. “It was chaos. People were running outside, cars were backing out, shots were fired at those people.”
“We did not need to try to get to our car,” Becky Anderson said. “We would have been in the middle of that chaos.”
The couple decided that if the smoke they started to see turned black, they would have to leave their flimsy hideout. Then they heard a police officer outside ask if anyone was inside. They answered and he told them to get out. Another officer broke a window and Chris Anderson said he turned into a 12-year-old boy. “I thought that was the shooter, and I dived out the window,” he said. He carried a bump on his shin for months afterward.
Becky Anderson had a leg out the window when someone grabbed her and pulled her out. She worried who it was, but it was another first responder.
That night, when the couple read scriptures together, Chris Anderson read from the Book of Mormon about people who ran into a city for protection and were told by a prophet to pray and they would be spared.
“That,” the Spirit told Anderson, “is what I needed you to do today.”
Now Chris Anderson tells people that if they ever have to use BYU-Pathway’s active-shooter training, they should choose to run, hide or fight and then add the component of prayer.
“Prayer is a principle, it’s a law that was governing those angels who were attending to us,” he said. “The Lord is just more effective when that’s being done.”
### Life’s biggest dilemmas
How does beauty come from ashes? How is it that in a world warped by online harshness and division that human connection and divine forces can still fashion slow and steady healing for shattered women and men and children?
God didn’t allow the Grand Blanc tragedy to happen, Latter-day Saints said. It was caused by a person who made horrific choices.
For Brooks, amazed in the miracles of survival, she qualified her statements out of consideration for others who may feel differently.
“I don’t like it,” she said, “when people say it was just meant to be or it had to happen. That feels tacky, especially if you’re one of the ones who lost someone.”
President Sanchez found that ministering to the ward required prayers and inspiration for helping each person individually.
“Everyone’s at different points in their journeys, and everybody has different needs,” he said. “Some are moving forward with resiliency, others are really struggling, some of them in the same family.”
At least one person who lost a family member has told others that it has been a struggle to find God in those eight awful minutes. Trauma therapy and seeking to understand each other’s feelings has taught everyone to take pains to be understanding of differing experiences. Woven through their stories are the efforts the survivors have made to make sense from chaos and to assign meaning and purpose to their actions.
Here is what some of the survivors said has helped them.
### Survivor strategies for healing and moving forward
The Latter-day Saints interviewed for this story said they know the Grand Blanc church shooting is a part of their stories now. Most felt like they were drowning in anxiety and fear and grief at first, but faith, connection and therapy have led the way since.
Ward members confronted one of the toughest obstacles 48 hours after the shooting. Elder David A. Bednar of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles traveled from Utah to Michigan to meet with them when most couldn’t imagine leaving their homes or entering another church building. But they filled the meetinghouse in Flint anyway, calmed by a heavy police presence outside.
“That was a turning point for me,” said Rick Brooks, who had returned to work the same day but left early because he couldn’t concentrate. “I felt perfect love in that meeting. Love casts out fear.”
Some church members found strength in gathering information. Kennedy Brooks loves puzzles, so piecing together everyone’s stories has helped her and her family.
“I can’t wait to be on the other side of the veil and ask the Lord to play it all out for me,” said her mother Katie Brooks. “I’d love to see where the angels were directing us and helping us.”
When they hear what others report about seeing God’s light among the hail of bullets, flames and black smoke, they feel a way forward. That doesn’t mean it’s been easy. The shelf in the Brooks’ living room that Katie Brooks decorates each season and holiday remained empty for a year. This month, she covered it in fall harvest pieces.
### Journaling and other strategies
Church leaders recognized that trauma recovery requires specialized training and offered counselors. One was available at the ward’s worship service on Sunday.
Therapists recommended journaling because it allows survivors to acknowledge what happened and address their feelings. Over time, the exercise helps them to recall the details with reduced emotional load.
Sheik said a part of every one of her early therapy sessions included writing down everything she could remember until she had it all on paper. Meanwhile, her middle school administration created a plan to cover her classes so she could walk away any time she felt overwhelmed. It was crucial for a woman who had a hard time leaving her house.
“I like to lie to myself to get myself to go places,” she said. “Like, ‘Oh, I’ll just show up for two minutes to that event.’ And then you get there, and it’s OK, so you stay. That’s why the plan at work was so important, because if I didn’t feel like I had that exit route, I wouldn’t have been able to go.”
Strangely for her, Sheik still struggles to make dinners. Maybe it’s mental fatigue, she said. She has been grateful for meals provided by the Grand Blanc Stake and others. Meanwhile, she follows other healthy advice — physical activity, hydration, facing the grief when it comes rather than repressing it. Group therapy with ward members has been another critical aid.
“That was really helpful because it got to a point where it felt isolating again,” she said. “Everybody had kind of moved on, and even on Sundays we’re not really focused on (the tragedy) because we’re focused on the Sabbath. So you kind of feel like, ‘Am I the only one that’s still struggling?’ So it was nice to have the group sessions to kind of talk about similar things that we’re going through and realize, ‘Oh yeah, we’re all still doing it.’”
Sheik and her husband took work off on the anniversary Monday and kept their children home from school. It was time to take back some control and build new family memories together. She’ll be glad when the 28th is in the rearview mirror.
### He came to destroy their faith; they won’t give it up
Friends at school have looked out for the Latter-day Saint kids. Colleagues at work have done the same. The city, county and local health systems have provided support. Her volleyball coach let Kennedy Brooks play the day after the shooting even though she had missed school.
Thousands sent emails, handwritten letters, cards, gifts and monetary donations from all over the world. “It was totally overwhelming,” President Sanchez said. “Thank you on behalf of the Grand Blanc Ward. It’s been a tremendous blessing.”
Meanwhile, experts also suggested finding symbols to give new meaning to the horrible event. The Brooks’ home is full of those symbols. There is a painting of Christ carrying a lamb. A wood sign on the porch says, “Thankful,” while another inside the home suggests, “Find joy in the journey.” A detail painting of Christ’s hand is a reminder of a larger one that had been on display in the meetinghouse.
One of the most meaningful symbols in the living room is a charred page from a hymnbook damaged in the fire. The page is for “Blessed Savior, Dear Redeemer.”
All of it is helping, however long it takes, the roller coaster to flatten out. “I can see bits of myself coming back,” Sheik said.
Their attacker came to destroy their faith. The members of the Grand Blanc Ward refuse to relent. “I know many in the ward are still struggling,” Chris Anderson said, “but they keep coming to church when it’s a real choice to go.”
Bishop Schaub said that is evidence of an important truth.
“There’s no better source of happiness and peace than our Lord, Jesus Christ,” he said. “We’ve come out stronger.”
### ‘We can never deny it’
Becky Anderson said faith provided a crucial component of peace when their safety was lost. “Faith is all there is,” she said. “That’s all we have.”
Her husband said he made that decision years ago when he went through another tragedy. “The Spirit told me, ‘This is my plan. I’ve known all things from the beginning, and I’ve prepared for this.’
“I’ve just clung to that.”
Monday night’s groundbreaking signals a renewal. Rebuilding is a physical manifestation of moving ahead into a second year of recovery, Rick Brooks said.
“I love the word ‘rebuild,’” said another ward member, Cindy Hougaboom. “Not only is the stake center being rebuilt, but we’re rebuilding ourselves in the process.”
It’s also a manifestation of a Latter-day Saint teaching they believe to be true.
“We teach that even in hard things, in tragedy, we can feel our Savior with us,” Katie Brooks said. “We teach it to our children, but now we’ve lived it. I never thought, ‘The Lord has abandoned us.’ I felt comfort even in our fear. We can never deny it.”
On Sunday, the ward closed its sacrament meeting with the Christian hymn, “It Is Well with My Soul”:
_“Whatever my lot, / Thou hast taught me to say, / ‘It is well, it is well with my soul.’ / ... Christ hath regarded my helpless estate / And hath shed his own blood for my soul. / It is well, it is well with my soul.”_
