In the wake of last month's mass shooting in Las Vegas,
Americans were again forced to confront and question
the nature of this country's tragic attachment to guns.
Hundreds of families have suffered the loss of loved ones
in these massacres,
but those who survive such incidents
face unique challenges as well.
As Soledad O'Brien reports, two young men
who fortunately survived notorious mass shootings
have found solace through their mutual love of football.
-All right, you ready? -Yeah.
You ready to roll? Let's go.
SOLEDAD O'BRIEN: Though separated by thirteen years in age,
Reichen Posey and Jordan Murphy share an unbreakable bond
forged by a love of football.
JORDAN MURPHY: Good catch.
What percentage of your day would you guess
that you're thinking about football?
-Eighty... five. -(O'BRIEN LAUGHS)
The rest of the percent I have to think about school.
MURPHY: Set, hit.
O'BRIEN: And, nearly every Sunday
the two run drills together.
With Jordan, a former division one college fullback
teaching Reichen the finer points of the game.
How long do you practice together?
Uh, usually like an hour and a half to two hours.
Oh, he's no joke.
No, he likes practicing. (CHUCKLES)
The things I've taught him he just takes to heart
and takes off with 'em.
He works harder than any kid I've seen at this age.
O'BRIEN: Their workouts, though, aren't just about football,
they're a form of therapy for a boy of 11
who was once so troubled he would hardly leave his house.
I feel, like, relieved after I do it, like,
-takes my mind off of things. -Mm-hmm.
When I get there, I just think about football
and I don't think about all the bad stuff.
Tragic news out of Connecticut. 26 people were killed,
20 of them children when a gunman...
O'BRIEN: Five years ago, at age six,
Reichen endured the unthinkable
when he survived one of the worst mass shootings
in American history.
WOMAN 1: (OVER PHONE) They're still shooting.
(GUN SHOTS OVER PHONE)
MAN 2: (OVER PHONE) There's still shooting going on,
-please. -(GUNSHOTS OVER PHONE)
O'BRIEN: Most of the victims at Reichen's school,
Sandy Hook Elementary,
were his first-grade classmates and friends.
Reichen knew something was wrong when he heard a loud noise
shortly after the school day began.
It was, like, a big, like, bang sound, and then, uh,
my teacher peeked out the door and she shut it really quickly,
and then she, like,
told us all to go to the back of the room.
O'BRIEN: Screams soon followed,
and the gunman entered.
REICHEN POSEY: He kinda, like, banged the door open
and then he was, like, coming across with his, like, gun
pointing at all of us.
And then he shot my teacher... and then another kid
and I'm, like, "Uh-oh, I better get out of here."
So, when he was reloading, me and nine others
just, like, ran as fast as we could.
-It must've been so upsetting. -Yeah.
-And my sister's in that school. -Mm-hmm.
So, I was bawling my head off the whole time.
O'BRIEN: Reichen's older sister, Amayla,
was in class across the hall.
She too survived the shooting, but the family was devastated.
For Reichen's parents, Dave and Carly Posey,
the details were so horrific,
they could hardly comprehend them.
Reichen said when he was running out of his classroom,
he almost slipped in the blood that was on the hallway.
I mean, that just doesn't seem right.
And, um, he's a six-year old kid, you know, I don't know.
Uh... his imagination going but he finally fell asleep
and that was weighing on my mind, that slipping in the blood
-and stuff. -That detail's horrible.
That detail, it was terrible.
So, I went downstairs and,
um, picked up his shoes
and there was blood all over his shoes.
And, so then, I was like, "Okay. This is real."
O'BRIEN: Soon after the tragedy,
the family moved to the Denver suburbs,
leaving Sandy Hook behind.
But Reichen couldn't leave behind the memories.
He wasn't a kid anymore.
His mind was just too full of...
bad to enjoy...
what he used to enjoy.
He was a happy kid. Really, really happy kid before.
That went away. He was not happy... at all.
I was kinda just like processing in my mind what just happened.
So, I was just in shock for a while.
-Were you crying? -Yeah, I'd cry about every day.
Just thinking about what happened.
Reichen wouldn't walk outside the front door, for...
seven months.
He wouldn't go out on the front yard to go
meet a friend or ride a bike or... anything.
He didn't play with toys ever again after that day.
He didn't have the focus
to be able to sit and think about playing.
It was all about,
"Am I safe? How am I gonna be safe?"
That must've have been horrible to see.
Yeah. It was terrible. It was hard to see him...
not wanna push, not wanna participate in life.
O'BRIEN: There was one place in particular
Reichen says he feared the most.
REICHEN: Going back to school
was the hardest thing I've ever done in my life.
And, like, I didn't wanna go back at all because I thought
it could happen again.
I'd just look around the school everyday
and just think in my mind, like, "In this situation,
what would I do and where would I go?
In this situation, what would I do?" and stuff.
It must've been very hard
to think about schoolwork and homework
when all these thoughts are racing through your head,
that are pretty terrible.
Yeah. So, um, the only way I could think about it
is by football.
O'BRIEN: Football became Reichen's therapy.
At school, he left class nearly every hour to toss the ball
with counselors and staff.
They soon realized
it was the only way to get Reichen to focus.
CARLY POSEY: If I knew he needed to go take a shower
or if he needed to go sit and do his homework,
or we were gonna sit down to eat dinner,
I realized, like,
he's so much better after we've played football.
To do any of those things.
How many times a day were you throwing the football with Reichen?
Well, it'd be multiple times a day,
and it would be for hours.
Not just in the backyard.
If I wanted to sit on the couch, I was throwin' him the football.
It just never stopped.
How many footballs
-did you wear out? -Ugh. 50?
-Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. -Probably about 50 footballs
in the last... five years.
That just fell apart 'cause you were doing it so much?
Yeah, just done.
O'BRIEN: Even at night, Reichen clutched the football
in his sleep, like a teddy bear.
What Reichen didn't know at the time
was that just a few miles away, another football player
was battling the same demons.
Can you walk me through what happened
in the theater in Aurora?
It was horrifying, people started screaming,
the-- the smells of it, I don't forget those smells.
They stay with you.
WOMAN 1 (ON PHONE): We got people runnin' out of the theater
that are shot.
MAN 1 (ON PHONE): We got seven down in theater nine!
Seven down!
O'BRIEN: Five months before Sandy Hook,
Jordan Murphey, a fullback
for the University of Colorado football team,
was at the midnight showing of the Batman movie
in Aurora, Colorado that became infamous
when a man in costume burst in and opened fire.
I felt the bullet just whiz by my head,
uh, hit the drywall in front of me,
drywall went in my eyes...
Um, I didn't know exactly what had happened.
I thought maybe I got hit,
there was adrenaline rushing, didn't feel it.
Um, I just sprinted out of there.
And when I was exiting the theater,
I saw a girl severely wounded... um, young girl.
And that-- that's something, um, that's an image
that will never leave.
It was a hard, hard thing to see.
O'BRIEN: That young girl and 11 others died that day.
In the aftermath, Jordan worried
he would never be the same.
I was at heightened levels of anxiety,
right off the bat.
Um, little things bothered me.
I'm triggered by-- It's weird, but light rails,
when I'm in the public transportation--
-Being on a train? -Mm-hmm.
At theme parks.
Just a place where there's a lot of people.
Things that are supposed to be fun,
like a birthday party, I'm always looking at the exits,
I'm always thinking about the worst thing.
-Sounds exhausting. -It is.
It's immensely exhausting. My mind... is always running.
It's never, never slowed down since that event.
(CROWD CHEERING)
FOOTBALL COMMENTATOR 1: Oh, my goodness!
That was Murphey. And that's what he does.
O'BRIEN: But he always felt normal...
when he was back with the football team
at the University of Colorado.
Well, football has always been my escape route, my therapy.
Um, immediately after the theater,
that was one of the first activities I did.
And I'd go right in there and...
I-- Let go of the outside world,
when I'm on the field.
O'BRIEN: Jordan poured himself into the sport
and eventually became a team captain.
Meanwhile, an aid at Reichen's school
realized she knew not just one, but two, football players
who survived mass shootings, and who might help each other.
A meeting was set up.
I was kinda surprised, he was, like, ginormous.
And then-- and then I heard him talk, I'm like,
"Wow, he does not talk like he looks at all, so..."
-What do you mean? -Like, he-- he was really big,
but he was, like, a nice guy and all that.
Did you think that you were gonna have a--
-a friendship? -Yeah, I did,
because, like, we-- we went through the same things
and since I knew that somebody loved football
and he went through the same things,
that I'm not, like, alone.
Did you feel like you needed to talk to somebody
who had gone through kind of what you'd gone through?
Yeah, I think I needed that, that was...
something deep inside to-- to hear that it's gonna be okay.
I-- I got through this.
Set, hit!
O'BRIEN: That mutual support
carries over to the football field,
where Reichen and Jordan
spend most of their time together.
Doubles, doubles, doubles, doubles!
O'BRIEN: Jordan is now a high school football coach,
while Reichen is playing
for the local youth football team.
(CLAPS) Good job out there.
O'BRIEN: And at his practices and games,
his personal coach is there to follow his every move.
There's nothing like being in the game,
but the closest I get now is coaching
and helping other kids...
get to that level, and that's what I want to do with Reichen.
Do you think he's making you better?
Yeah, definitely.
-You think-- yeah? -Much better.
-Oh, you just trucked me, nards. -Oh yeah.
O'BRIEN: And though football is their main connection,
the two carve out time for fun off the field.
-Oh! -Oh, you played it! Was that...
O'BRIEN: The Poseys say it was crucial for Reichen,
who had a hard time envisioning his future,
to meet someone older who'd survived the same ordeal.
Jordan gave him that look ahead of time
that it's-- your-- it's gonna be alright,
because look at what he's doing, and he's older,
and he's playing football, still.
So, it-- it just calmed him down,
it made him... it changed him.
How important has that friendship been?
JORDAN: Oh, it's been huge for me.
When I met him, like, "Hey, I'm gonna help this--
this young kid, um, overcome what he went though.
I'm gonna try to use my past experiences
to lift him up, and in the end, he taught me a lesson.
He goes into school every day.
The classroom's where the tragic event happened.
For me, the-- the tragic event happened in a theater.
I don't have to go into the theater ever again
if I don't want to.
And he's going every day into his school.
And looking it straight in the face,
and that inspired me.
How would you describe... your relationship with Jordan?
I look up to him
because he was so successful in football,
I just kinda felt like I can be that successful.
He-- he's just a bigger me, I feel like. (CHUCKLES)
I love that. I think he might tell me,
-you're a smaller him. -Yeah.
Thanks for watching.
Remember, you can catch the rest of the latest edition
of Real Sports all month long.
On HBO.
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