Daily Herald opinion: As Highland Park shooter faces sentencing, we should focus on the victims and heroes of July 4, 2022

If you were among the millions that watched Max’s hit medical drama “The Pitt” in recent weeks, the scenes most likely to stick with you are those set in the aftermath of a mass shooting.

The show chronicles long hours across a single, heart-wrenching day in a Pittsburgh emergency room. Doctors and nurses treat the kind of patients that walk through the doors of any ER: those dealing with substance abuse, crashes, falls and pneumonia. But the episodes built around a bloody shooting rampage are particularly disturbing, calling to mind the kind of senseless high-profile mass shootings at places including a Las Vegas music festival, a school in Uvalde and, just Thursday, at Florida State University.

For suburbanites, it also evoked the attack on a Highland Park parade three years ago.

In fact, the timing of “The Pitt” eerily hit home for anyone touched by the Highland Park shootings on July 4, 2022, during which a 21-year-old gunman killed seven and injured dozens of others, including an 8-year-old boy.

The show premiered a month before the scheduled start of the defendant’s trial, and episodes involving the fictional shooting were released against the backdrop of jury selection and what would have been the actual trial had Robert Crimo III not pleaded guilty in early March.

Next week, he is scheduled to be sentenced on crimes that mandate, under Illinois law, life in prison. But before the sentence is passed down, those affected by the tragedy will have a chance to speak.

Shooting survivors will likely describe their terror that day and the pain that followed, brought on wounds both physical and emotional. Families will talk of burying their loved ones too soon.

But “The Pitt,” while fictional, reminds us that trauma from this kind of tragedy ripples out beyond those in the line of fire.

First responders, both those present at the time shots rang out and those called to the scene after, were no doubt deeply affected by what they witnessed. And we can only imagine — and pay tribute to — the heroic measures of real-life emergency room doctors and nurses who fought to save lives and whose actions may have prevented the death toll from growing.

One nurse told WGN she was diagnosed with PTSD after treating what she described as “war wounds” on the day of the massacre.

We don’t know if the gunman will attempt to offer words of regret or remorse before his sentence is handed down; he hasn’t done so thus far. We don’t even know if he will appear in court or if family members will speak on his behalf.

Nothing he might say, however, will excuse what he did that day. Nothing will ease the pain of those still grieving the loss of a parent, a spouse, a child.

Next week, perhaps, there will be a measure of closure or justice for the victims. When the hearing begins Wednesday, our focus should be on them and on the heroes who rushed to help, including police officers, paramedics, brave bystanders and, yes, the doctors and nurses who tirelessly treated the wounded.

We must never forget them.