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Recovery Services Provided To Victims, First Responders Of 2016 Harvey Co. Mass Shooting

Abigail Beckman
/
KMUW/File Photo

A grant is helping to provide long-term recovery services for people who were affected by last year’s deadly shooting in Hesston.

The grant is for $225,000 and will pay for counseling services, as well as other needs victims or first responders might have, such as transportation, clothing, food or housing.

A gunmanshot and killed three people at Excel Industries and wounded 14 others before he was killed by the chief of police last February.

Harvey County Administrator John Waltner says the community is still healing and needs support.

"We’ve developed a contract with Prairie View here in Newton to provide for those ongoing counseling services that people might need, and we continue to see a significant need for those services," Waltner says.

Waltner says the grant was awarded to SafeHope, a domestic violence and sexual assault shelter.

He says Harvey County and SafeHope are working to create a new resiliency program.

Two people will be hired to get the program started while the county applies for additional grants. The new positions are a program coordinator and a criminal justice advocate.

The grant is funded by the Victims of Crime Act through the Kansas Governor’s Grant Program.

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Follow Deborah Shaar on Twitter @deborahshaar

 
To contact KMUW News or to send in a news tip, reach us at news@kmuw.org.

 

Deborah joined the news team at KMUW in September 2014 as a news reporter. She spent more than a dozen years working in news at both public and commercial radio and television stations in Ohio, West Virginia and Detroit, Michigan. Before relocating to Wichita in 2013, Deborah taught news and broadcasting classes at Tarrant County College in the Dallas-Fort Worth, Texas area.