Jessica Carr oral history interview, 2024 September 03

Oral history interview with Jessica Carr conducted by Claytee D. White and Stefani Evans on September 3, 2024 for the UNLV Remembers: an Oral History of the 6 December 2023 Shootings project. In this interview, Carr, who works in the UNLV Academic Success Center (ASC) as the learning programs coordinator, recalls the events of December 6, 2023. Carr briefly met with a professor in Beam Hall and then returned to her office in the ASC building. Once in her office, she received the first alerts and locked herself in her windowless office and began texting her students, co-workers, and family. She and her colleagues eventually evacuated to the Thomas & Mack Center, and she walked back across campus to retrieve her car from the old EPA lot across Harmon north of Lied Library. She describes her ability to process trauma and shares that it comes from a very traumatic childhood. Her ability to process the trauma began when she was in high school and first learned her maternal grandfather was so racist her mother never told him she had married a Black man and had a mixed-race daughter. Carr began seeing a grief therapist five months before her father died, and the mantras she learned through that experience helped her process her feelings of December 6. She discusses her thoughts on whether she has the right to feel trauma when others experienced it worse; anger at "the system”; and how she can do more to help better the world. Digital audio and transcript available.