Old West End Festival Ends Early Due To Gun Violence

We’ve been hav­ing an infor­ma­tion booth at the Old West End Festival for sev­er­al years. It is two days we get to meet poten­tial new mem­bers and to edu­cate oth­ers about Humanism.

On Saturday June 6th, I left my shift at our booth at 3 PM and two oth­er mem­bers took my place. I was at home when the ini­tial reports came out about 5:30 PM of shots being fired at the fes­ti­val. I made sure our vol­un­teers were account­ed for and the inci­dent hap­pened about a mile from where the booths were in the north­ern part of the fes­ti­val area. (In the map shown the shoot­ing hap­pened in the red box area and the SHoWLE booth was in the blue box area in the south)

The Marketplace area where our booth was locat­ed closed at 5 PM so it was lucky our vol­un­teers avoid­ed the inci­dent.

The lat­er reports said 12 peo­ple were shot and 2 were crit­i­cal. The fes­ti­val orga­niz­ers can­celed the fes­ti­val for Sunday and we had a cou­ple of peo­ple trav­el to our booth to retrieve it.

On behalf of the Secular Humanists of Western Lake Erie, we want­ed to send our thoughts to those injured at a shoot­ing.

Hopefully we can return in 2027

– Douglas Berger President of SHoWLE