[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 160 (2014), Part 7]
[Senate]
[Pages 10121-10122]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                              GUN VIOLENCE

  Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, I hope the Presiding Officer and my 
colleagues had a great Father's Day this past Sunday. I had maybe the 
best Father's Day you can imagine because I got to spend part of it 
with my two sons and my father. We all went out to dinner with my wife, 
and it was a really special day.
  I come to the floor with both a light and heavy heart, light because 
I got to experience Father's Day in a way I wish thousands of other 
people across the country could experience it. The statistics of the 
number of people who are killed by guns every year is pretty stunning. 
There are tens of thousands of people all across this country who are 
losing their fathers and sons, in part because the Senate doesn't do 
anything to try to stem the scourge of gun violence across the country.
  As the Presiding Officer knows, I try to come to the floor every week 
for about 10 minutes or so to try and give voice to the victims of gun 
violence.
  Today, 24 hours having passed Father's Day, maybe we can talk a 
little bit about those who have lost their fathers and their sons--
little boys such as Logan Soldo.
  Logan is about to turn 1. He certainly doesn't know what happened to 
his father Igor, but when he is old enough, unfortunately he will hear 
a pretty horrific story. His father--having fled war-torn Bosnia as a 
13-year-old to settle in the United States--was killed in a shooting at 
a Walmart, which got a lot of attention about a week or so ago.
  Jared and Amanda Miller--fairly well-known radicals in the Las Vegas 
area--walked into a Walmart and shot Igor Soldo, a police officer, 
while he was eating at a restaurant.
  People talked about Igor and his journey. As I mentioned, he came 
here from the Balkans when he was 13 years old and graduated from 
Southeast High School in Lincoln, NE. Following high school, he studied 
criminal justice at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and worked part 
time as a corrections officer for 3 years in Lincoln where he met his 
wife Andrea. The couple were married in 2009. They were planning on 
celebrating their son's first birthday. His birthday will be on July 7. 
They were going to return from Las Vegas to Lincoln to celebrate it 
with friends and family, but instead Igor's family ventured and 
journeyed from Lincoln to Las Vegas to bid farewell to their son, who 
was a police officer killed in this episode of horrific violence which 
killed two others and eventually also led to the death of the two 
shooters.
  One of his fellow officers, who was one of Igor's close buddies, told 
the story at his funeral about how close Igor was to his son. He said, 
through tears, to the crowd:

       I started getting pictures of Igor and Logan. I would see 
     him with Logan over at the house and it was clear . . . our 
     once epic romance was being replaced.

  Logan Soldo will never know his dad, but there are thousands who lose 
their sons every year.
  Over the weekend some of my colleagues might have had a chance to 
read an op-ed in the Washington Post written by Mark Barden and David 
Wheeler. Mark and David lost their sons, Daniel and Ben, in Sandy Hook. 
They talked about what Father's Day has become. They said:

       We know Father's Day is meant to be a day when fathers sit 
     back on their couches, watch sports and take it easy. But 
     this Father's Day, we ask you to do one thing differently. 
     Look at your children, your beautiful, growing, pesky 
     children who bring you so much joy and sometimes cause you so 
     much heartache, and ask yourself--really ask yourself--this: 
     Am I doing everything I can to keep them safe? Because the 
     answer to that question, if we all answer honestly, clearly 
     is no.

  Of course, that is the answer here in the Senate because we have 
witnessed over 70 school shootings since Sandy Hook. There were 35 
school shootings this year alone, and we are not even halfway through 
the year. There are 31,000 people a year--2,600 people a month, 86 
people a day--who are killed by guns, and we do nothing.
  We tried to pass a pretty simple bill that would expand the number of 
sales that would be subjected to a background check--supported by 80 
percent of the American public--on the floor of this Senate, but 
because of a Republican filibuster, we could not get it to a final 
vote. The numbers are clearly not moving people, so hopefully the 
stories will, stories such as that of one particular father who has 
become the face, in many ways, of the Sandy Hook tragedy, Neil Heslin.

[[Page 10122]]

  Many people have heard Mr. Heslin talk because he probably talks in 
the most poignant, open, soul-baring terms of any of the parents.
  Twenty-four hours removed from Father's Day--which many of us got to 
spend with our dads and our kids--I will leave you with the words from 
Neil Heslin's testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee:

       On December 14, Jesse got up and got ready for school. He 
     was always excited to go to school. I remember on that day we 
     stopped by Misty Vale Deli. It's funny the things you 
     remember. I remember the hug he gave me when I dropped him 
     off. He just held me, and he rubbed my back. I can still feel 
     that hug.
       And Jesse said, ``It's going to be alright. Everything's 
     going to be okay, Dad.'' Looking back it makes me wonder. 
     What did he know? Did he have some idea about what was going 
     to happen? But at the time I didn't think much of it. He was 
     just being sweet.
       He was always being sweet like that. He was the kind of kid 
     who used to leave me voice messages where he'd sing me happy 
     birthday even if it wasn't my birthday. I'd ask him about it, 
     and he'd say, ``I just wanted to make you feel happy.'' Half 
     the time I felt like he was the parent and I was his son.

  Taking a break from Neil's testimony for a second, this was Neil's 
only family. He was separated from his wife. Neil has been unemployed, 
bopping between different housing situations. His entire family--his 
entire life--was his son Jesse.
  Neil went on to say:

       Jesse just had this idea that you never leave people hurt. 
     If you can help somebody, you do it. If you can make somebody 
     feel better, you do it. If you can leave somebody a little 
     better off, you do it.
       They tell me that's how he died.
       When he heard the shooting--at Sandy Hook Elementary School 
     that day--he didn't run and hide. He started yelling. People 
     disagree on the last thing he said. One person who was there 
     said he yelled ``run.'' Another person said he told everybody 
     to ``run now.''
       What I know is that Jesse wasn't shot in the back. He took 
     two bullets. The first one grazed off the side of his head, 
     but that didn't stop him from yelling. The other hit him in 
     the forehead. Both bullets were fired from the front.
       I hate to say it but even when you know your community has 
     been hit, you hope and pray it wasn't your boy. They had us 
     all to go to a fire station to wait and see if our kids would 
     make it out of the school. By 3:30, maybe 4 o'clock, they 
     told us there were no more survivors. I should have realized. 
     They'd basically told me my son was dead, but I waited. I 
     told the people what to look for, what he'd been wearing that 
     day. He had this striped shirt and Carhartt jacket, and these 
     pants that fit him in September, but then he hit a growth 
     spurt. I gave the description and I waited some more. I 
     waited and I hoped, until 1:30 in the morning. That's when 
     they told me he wasn't coming.

  Breaking away from his testimony again for a second, I was at that 
fire house, and I will never forget the scene of Neil Heslin sitting by 
himself hour after hour.
  Returning to his testimony, he concludes by saying:

       Before he died, Jesse and I used to talk about maybe coming 
     to Washington some day. He wanted to go to the Washington 
     Monument. When he talked about it last year, Jesse asked if 
     we could come and meet the President.
       I said earlier that I can be a little cynical about 
     politicians. But Jesse believed in you.

  This is Neil talking to us.

       He learned about you in school and he believed in you. I 
     want to believe in you, too. I know you can't give me Jesse 
     back. Believe me, if I thought you could I'd be asking you 
     for that. But I want to believe that you will think about 
     what I told you here today. I want to believe you'll think 
     about it and then you'll do something about it, whatever you 
     can do to make sure no other father has to see what I've 
     seen.

  Mr. President, I yield the floor, and I note the absence of a quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
  The bill clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. McCAIN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for 
the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  Mr. McCAIN. Mr. President, I ask to be recognized in morning 
business.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Arizona.

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