USA TODAY National
Tuesday was picture day at Mason Elementary School in Grand Blanc Township.
Smiles were hard to come by.
Monday’s classes had been canceled after a deadly attack the day before at The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints a half-mile away.
Nine families from the school attended the church. Hundreds of others lived close enough to hear the gunshots and taste the smoke from the fire that destroyed it.
Long-time teacher Jan Cornelison admired the photographer for trying to coax smiles out of her fifth graders. She understood why the task was so hard.
“Today, I said to them, you know boys and girls, what happened on Sunday is going to be one of those things that you will always say ‘I remember where I was when I heard the news,’” she said. “I remember the sirens.”
Grand Blanc itself will remember Sept. 28, 2025, as the day the national scourge of mass shootings came to town, a town that may once have thought itself immune to that kind of thing.
Investigators said Thomas Sanford, 40, of Burton, Michigan, rammed his pickup truck into the church, jumped out and began firing an assault rifle at congregants. They believe the former Marine also set the fire that sent up plumes of black smoke and cast down cinders and ash on the surrounding neighborhoods. Police arrived and shot him dead. Four died and eight were injured.
Crimes like this are unheard of in Grand Blanc, a city surrounded by a larger township with the same name. Combined, they have a population of about 48,000.
Lost innocence
Grand Blanc is 50 miles north of Downtown Detroit though it’s better known for its proximity to Flint, which is 5 miles up the road. Since the auto industry has retreated, Flint has been marred by poverty and violence. The water crisis a decade ago decimated the city and the schools.
Grand Blanc is different. Residents here have above-average educational backgrounds and the higher incomes that accompany them. Outside Michigan, Grand Blanc is probably best known as the home of Warwick Hills Country Club, long-time site of the Buick Open golf tournament on the PGA tour. The club now hosts the Ally Challenge, a senior event on the PGA Champions Tour.
People come to Grand Blanc for good schools, low crime and a sense of belonging.
At the center of town, behind Grand Blanc High School, is Don Batchelor Field, a 6,000-seat multipurpose stadium where the school’s football team plays. It was built as part of a $44 million sports complex paid for with a bond approved by school district voters in 2020.
The complex is decorated in the school colors, red and black with the Bobcat logo prominently displayed.
“We love our football,” said Sonya James, principal at Mason Elementary School. "If you're out on your porch in town, you can hear the announcers and the crowd."
The stadium will host a gathering Tuesday evening, Oct. 7, for people to remember those lost in the attack and to point a way forward for a community that's still reeling.
“Our innocence, we lost it,” said Barb Smith, 77, who leads Fish Inc., a volunteer-run nonprofit that provides a food pantry, free clothing, holiday baskets and other services to needy people in the area. “But we’re strong. We will get past it.”
Neighbors helping neighbors
The motto of Fish Inc., is neighbors helping neighbors. That resolve was echoed across Grand Blanc throughout the week, as people scrambled for ways to do something, anything to help.
The danger of the fire and the need for investigators to comb through it prompted police to cordon off McCandlish Road. Officers have stood guard at the yellow police tape around the clock since Sunday.
“We’d have random people pull up, the trunk pops open and out comes a case of water and some donuts or bagels,” said Genesee County Sheriff Chris Swanson. “People just want to help.”
The Grand Blanc Chamber of Commerce has been coordinating food deliveries to first responders courtesy of businesses in town who wanted to do their part.
“Lunch, dinner, breakfast, you name it,” said Chamber President Leigh LaForest. “They're local businesses that have just said, ‘Hey, what can I do?’ Like Leo's Coney Island, Pita Way, Mario's, Little Caesars, you name it.”
LaForest felt the urge herself. She had been shopping Sunday morning and had just placed her groceries on the kitchen counter when she saw an alert on her phone about the church shooting. Her husband was mowing the lawn.
"I said, something is going on in Grand Blanc and I need to go, I'll call you when I can," she said.
LaForest said she didn't know where she could help so she called a friend who works for the local American Red Cross. The friend said church members were being taken to the Trillium, a movie theater in town.
"I showed up and they had been transporting people from the church," LaForest said. "That's something I never want to see, ever. I stood around for a while just trying to figure out how I could help."
Police used the theater as a safe place to move the church members and to conduct witness interviews with them before releasing them.
LaForest began calling chamber members who had restaurants to see if they would bring food.
'This won't be the last'
Scott Sassack owns the Great Harvest Bread in town. He was one of LaForest's calls. He was as shocked as she was.
"I can't imagine that happened in our own town," he said. "We're becoming numb to this. I think I would be numb to this if it didn't happen in my own town. But I always say too, 'This won't be the last.' That's a sad thing. There'll be one next week, next month, somewhere else. You'll see a copycat, something, and it's just the way society is running."
Monday morning, Sassack pulled in his staff and prepared them to help, telling them it was the the calm before the storm.
“We’ve been delivering sandwiches every day," he said. "Were donating 10% of our sales every day through Sunday. We’ve also got a bucket out on the counter for people who want to contribute. I’ve probably got over $1,000 in there right now.”
Sassack was born and raised in Grand Blanc and the community supported him when he needed it most.
"I wrap myself around the community," he said. "Like when we were in COVID, we were deemed a grocery store and we had lines out our door, and we were able to survive."
LaForest said she’s also fielded calls from a moving company, a construction firm and an interior designer.
“We've had retailers reach out, ‘Do they need clothing?’” LaForest said. “The hard part is we don't know what they need right now, so we're compiling this list that is going to be very helpful.”
Something meaningful to offer
Smith said her group, Fish Inc., often helps victims of house fires with food, clothing and temporary shelter. But this case is different. The victims of last week’s attack lost their church, not their homes.
She likened it to a funeral, where there is a lot of support for the grieving in the moment. But when that’s over, the survivors must return to normal life, or at least try.
“When people are gone then all of a sudden, there's not all that support there and you have to think about what's happening,” she said. “I think that is when we can be more of an assistance.”
Smith said the church members aren’t losing their jobs because of the attack, but they may not be able to flip a switch and return to work either. She said several widows volunteer at Fish. It keeps their minds busy and gives them a chance to socialize and feel like they’re doing something meaningful.
“They're doing a community service that takes their mind off the heartache that they're facing, because not everybody's gonna go to a therapist, she said.
She invited survivors of the church attack to consider doing something similar.
“It's a good place for them to feel welcome,” she said. “If they want to cry, they can cry. If they want to be angry, they can be angry, but it helps with hurt.”
'I'd do it for anybody'
Other folks did their part to help as well.
Jerry Eaton, 78, is a retired finance guy from General Motors. He lives in a condo just south of the church. When the attack happened, a man who'd been shot in the hand and a woman with four kids were among the people fleeing in the direction of his home.
"I asked them if they'd like to come in, and they did," he said. "It was just that. That's all. I mean, I'd do it for anybody."
Eaton was shocked that such a thing happened so close to home.
“You see it on TV, but you think that’s never gonna happen here," he said.
Eaton said the eldest child with the woman was about 9 and the youngest was just a baby. He knew the attack on the church was on the TV news, but he didn't want the kids to see it. He turned the TV to cartoons for them to watch and gave them some watermelon he had in the fridge.
The family stayed several hours until the woman's husband could get a car close enough to pick up them up.
“We kind of made friends. I guess that's nice," he said. "We got to try to get along and try and help one another out. My wife and I try to be decent. I've screwed up, like everybody has I guess, but I try to help."
The woman said she would like to return to thank him again.
'Heaviness in the air'
At Mason Elementary School on Wednesday morning, things were different. The nine students whose families had been at the church were back in class. James briefed teachers on their return.
"It's just real quiet. It's kind of hard to explain for us. It feels like there's a heaviness in the air," James said. "Everyone just wants to have empathy and comfort for our families that were impacted. It's a really close, close community and we all come together when we need to support one another."
Cornelison's class didn't include any of those nine, but she knew her kids would see them eventually.
"Please be cautious and remember that we want to make sure that we're trying to allow them to come back to some normalcy," she told her class. "Conversations about them, or what happened, and all of that is something that we shouldn't be asking them, not today. Maybe, if you're really good friends with them, someplace down the line. If they talk about it, that's because they bring up the conversation. But try to remember that they're trying to forget those things, which we know are never forgotten."
Cornelison said her students felt the impact as well and their 10-year-old minds think of things adults may not consider. One student whose desk is near the wall, asked to be moved after hearing about Sanford's pickup truck crashing into the church itself.
Other students didn't want to go out to recess because they had ash falling on their homes during the fire. Others were wary because there were still helicopters in the area. The kids associate helicopters with life flights to the local hospital, a sign that someone has been seriously injured, Cornelison said.
The school has access to a therapy dog, which was brought in the room next to Cornelison's room. In small groups, the students were allowed to get next to Louis, a lab-mix with an unflabble tempement, even when eight kids were petting him at once.
50 years of teaching and helping
Cornelison is something of an institution in Grand Blanc. She's 74 now. She graduated from Grand Blanc High and has taught in the school system for 50 years.
She's old enough to remember the heyday of Flint's auto industry and the names of the family farms that became the subdivisions where many of her students now live. Her dentist is her former student. So is her doctor and his kids.
She's also found ways for students to help in tragic circumstances before.
In the 1990s, her class packed up teddy bears and shipped them to hospitalized children injured in the war in Kosovo. When Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans, her classes gathered books for students there. A parent drove them to Louisiana in a trailer borrowed from a local business.
When Oxford High School was the site of mass shooting in 2021, her students wrote poems for students there. Cornelison wants these students to do something similar for the families of the LDS church.
She's not quite sure what form it will take yet, but like so many people in Grand Blanc, her students want to do something to help.
On Wednesday morning, she talked to her class about what happened and asked them about the Grand Blanc community. What do they like about it and why do their families live there?
Some said their parents liked the schools or moved for a job. Others needed a bigger house when their family grew.
"What I really like about Grand Blanc is we're very good at bouncing back from other things and we just take care of our community," a boy named Cooper said.
A girl named Olivia echoed his thoughts.
"People can, like, try to take Grand Blanc down," she said. "But I like how we're all staying positive. Everyone's trying to stay positive."
Cornelison said she hopes that kind of positivity continues, even when the school photographer returns for more pictures.
"There is a makeup day," she said. "I think we're going to have a lot of make ups."
Andrea Souhari contributed to this report. Contact John Wisely: jwisely@freepress.com. On X: @jwisely
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Neighbors grieve, step up to help after tragedy in Grand Blanc Township
Reporting by John Wisely, USA TODAY NETWORK / Detroit Free Press
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