Jul 27, 2007 9:49 am US/Mountain
Ritter Helps Staff, Family After Capitol Shooting
by Jim Benemann
DENVER (CBS4) ―
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Gov. Bill Ritter, the former Denver District Attorney, is familiar with the effects of a crime can have on witnesses and wants to make sure staff members deal with what they saw appropriately.
CBS
Gov. Bill Ritter expects to receive an audit on security at the Colorado state Capitol by the weekend after last week's deadly shooting of a delusional gunman outside the governor's office. Ritter has spent that last week and a half making sure workers at the Capitol and his own family are properly dealing with the ordeal.
The governor was sure to emphasize in an interview with CBS4's Jim Benemann that the focus is not on him, but on the others caught in the ripple effect of the deadly shooting. A state trooper working security at the Capitol shot and killed Aaron Snyder who was carrying a gun and making threatening statements.
Ritter, the former Denver District Attorney, is familiar with the effects of a crime can have on witnesses and wants to make sure staff members deal with what they saw appropriately.
"We met with them and we said 'you need to really get help individually and we promise you do because we know this from our own experiences,'" Ritter said. "And if you defer it, it will visit you again and what I said to them is 'it's not a welcome visitor. You might not even know you need this help, but you need it.'"
The governor said he had great sympathy for Snyder who was apparently mentally disabled. Ritter just signed three new laws aimed at improving mental health care in Colorado. One of them adds mental illness to the list of conditions insurance companies must cover.
"It sounds like for a long time he had been decompensating and was under a doctor's care, but still, with that, was not coping," Ritter said. "I feel for him, I certainly feel for his family.
Ritter has also been taking care of his own family, especially his children.
"One is overseas," he said. "He learned about it from a girlfriend who learned about it from her mother who had seen it on CNN.
"My daughter was really upset by the whole thing. And so I was in a caretaker role with her. She was really concerned about my safety."
Ritter agreed the deadly shooting was shocking.
"Violence is an awful thing," he said. "The day we become numb to it, then we should all be concerned."
(© MMVII CBS Television Stations, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.)
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