Tucson Shooting Eyewitnesses Return to Scene

TUCSON, Jan. 11, 2011 -- Mellanie Fowler was clipping color-coded tags onto dress shirts inside the Sparkle Cleaners here Saturday when tires screeched and gunshots rang out just feet from the shop's front door.

"I could see it all," she said, looking out through the glass shop front to the scene of the crime. "I could see people falling, especially one of the elderly ladies, crumpled onto the road."

Jared Loughner is accused of killing six bystanders and wounding 14 in a bloody rampage that shook this suburban community, including many of the employees who work close by. The shootings happened at an event Rep. Gabrielle Giffords was holding for her Tucson constituents.

Fowler, 51, who's managed her store for four years, returned to the shop today for the first time since the shooting, reflecting on the importance of moving on and how trauma can make someone stronger.

"You have to move on. You just have to move on," she said.

Many of her customers didn't appear as brave. Only a handful meandered in to pick up their clothes, with many calling to have their dry cleaning delivered rather than have to get close to the scene of the carnage.

"I don't blame you, give it a month," she told one customer over the phone. "It'll be okay. Give it a month. At least we can think of it not as a random shooting."

On her first day back, Fowler said she has found strength in offering positive encouragement to others instead of dwelling on her own grief -- something she learned after a random, horrific attack hit her family 12 years ago.

"Someone tried to murder my dad in front of me and my children," she said, telling of how gang members stabbed her father in the driveway of her Salem, Oregon, home as part of an initiation rite. Her father survived, but the memory remains raw.

"I think sometimes bad things happen to some people to make you stronger. God thinks you can handle it," she said.

"In many ways that was worse," she said. "I wondered if they were going to come back for me and my children. The shooter here came for Gabrielle and those around her. If he came in and just started shooting up people randomly, I don't think I'd be here today."