Jack Jakosky, who owns a Newport Beach-based property-management company, was called away to Tucson last week to see if he could help reopen his shopping center's parking lot, which has been closed for several days, preventing easy customer access to stores.
The city name probably tipped you off as to why the La Toscana Village center remained surrounded by police tape: it's where six people were killed and Representative Gabrielle Giffords (D-Arizona) was seriously wounded by an apparently crazed gunman the morning of Jan. 8.
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The center's Safeway has been closed since the mass shooting, and the Pleasanton, California-based supermarket chain has sent grief counselors to Pima County to help workers cope with the tragedy.
There are no immediate plans to reopen the Safeway, but all the other stores in the center have since opened their doors. Several shopkeepers contacted Jakosky about working with the city and police to regain access to the parking lot so normal operations can resume, reports Inside Tucson Business.
Many merchants told the site business is down, and they worry about the long-term affects of the shooting.
John Peters, owner of a Pak Mail shipping store, told Inside Tucson Business his
receipts are down about $500 per day since the shooting.
“My
manager had customers at the counter when they heard the shots,” Peters
reportedly said. “He pushed them all into the bathroom for safety. As it turns out,
they were from the Middle East. They kept asking, 'Does this happen
often in Tucson? In America?'”
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.