What survivors of a train shooting 30 years ago can teach the people of Sunset Park

Terry Sullivan remembers how hard it was to get back on the Long Island Rail Road in the weeks after a gunman opened fire in his train in 1993.<br />“The toughest part was feeling the train slow down because that was the exact time that the gunman had started shooting,” Sullivan said.<br />Six people were killed and 19 others injured in the mass shooting that Sullivan witnessed almost thirty years ago. It was the last mass shooting on a train in New York until last month, when a gunman opened fire on an N train in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. This time, ten people were shot and no one was killed. Now, as the Sunset Park survivors begin the long road toward feeling safe again, the LIRR survivors have a unique perspective on what may lay ahead.<br />Kevin Zaleskie had been sitting several rows in front of Sullivan on the LIRR when the shooting happened. For months afterward, he was haunted by one thought: what if he had died?<br />“For a while, I felt like I was a ghost in my own house,” he said. “I would be out on the deck, grilling. I can look into these doors and see my family and say what would it be like if I wasn't here at all?”<br />In Sunset Park, people have been experiencing the same fear and stress.<br />“Usually in the mornings when I take the train, I usually take a nap. And now it's like you can't take a nap on the train no more. Now you gotta keep your eyes open, you gotta be in survival mode,” Evelyn Bermejo told Gothamist the day after the shooting.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />“Everybody's nervous right now,” another resident, Evelyn Torres, agreed. “You don't know what happened, you go out of your house but you don't know if you come back to your house.”<br />That dread is something Julia Jean-Francois has heard a lot. She is overseeing counseling for a number of the Brooklyn victims at the Center for Family Life In Sunset Park. She said people in Sunset Park, many of whom are immigrants, were living with some fear even before the shooting.<br />“I think the tr