Karen and Steve
The evening of Sunday, March 8, 2020 was closing down after a busy weekend for Karen Keene and Steve Glassman as the couple hustled about in their home preparing for the week ahead. Karen, the marketing and business development director for a large law firm, was preparing to co-chair the annual United Way women’s luncheon on Wednesday while Steve, Karen’s other half of 23 years and manager of a national trade show company, was working in his mancave at the house.
About 11 p.m. the couple was startled by what sounded like fireworks outside the front of their home. Karen reached the front room before Steve as the two tried to identify the source of the sounds. “All of a sudden, the entire door blew in,” she recalls. “I saw a very tall figure with gray hair who just started shooting.”
Moments before, Karen had been texting her brother, Christopher, and when the door crashed in, she bolted into the couple’s bedroom where she left her phone. Locking the door, she grabbed her phone on the bed and dialed for police, missing the 9-1-1 number the first time and scrambling to get it right the second time. As she dialed, she heard Steve shout, “What the fuck!” Within seconds gunfire blasted through the bedroom door while Karen was trying to reach the police. Frantic, she ran into the bathroom. “I fell on the floor. I had locked the door but kept holding the doorknob while he kept shooting through it.” Badly wounded and trapped, Karen looked around the room and saw her plastic bottle of hair conditioner oozing from bullet holes. “And then I saw a piece of my flesh on the wall.”
Suddenly, the shooting stopped. Karen lay still but hanging on to the doorknob. She had been shot multiple times in the abdomen and in her right leg. Terrified she heard a woman identify herself as a police officer directing her to open the door. The officer continued talking to Karen who made no move. “You’ve got to let me in,” the officer encouraged. Frightened she hesitantly opened the door. Unbeknownst to Karen, her beloved Steve lay dead in their home.
Accompanied by the police officer, Karen was rushed by ambulance to the Level One Trauma Center at Orlando Regional Medical Center. She remembers the officer talking to her during the ride. Upon arrival, the hospital’s trauma team (many of whom treated the victims of the Pulse Nightclub shooting in 2016) worked to save her life, ultimately placing her in a medically induced coma. She remained intubated and unconscious for nine days. Still intubated when she emerged from her coma, Karen was unable to communicate other than with the use of a small white board with letters that she could push around to form simple words.
As she began understanding her circumstances, Karen’s brother, Christopher, gently began breaking the news to his sister -- Steve had been killed. Adding to the shock, Christopher also revealed that the shooter was their brother, Kevin, and that he, too, was dead after taking his own life the next day during a police standoff at his own home.
At one point, Karen managed to spell out the word “Bella” on her small board to find out whether her beloved dog which she and Steve had rescued from the side of a road years earlier had survived. Bella was alive.
Christopher continued to carefully explain what happened from a basic fact level, including that a neighbor who heard the commotion watched Kevin walk out of the house and get in his car as if nothing had happened. The neighbor took down Kevin’s license tag number and provided it to the police enabling them to find him at his apartment the next day and where the standoff occurred. “The reason he didn’t kill me was because he got spooked,” states Karen.
Complicating an already horrific tragedy, this all occurred during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Karen recalls that while in the intensive care unit and seeing for the first time her trauma surgeon – Dr. Michael Cheatham – he was dressed in “hazmat stuff.” It would be months later before she ever saw him without protective gear.
“I saw a very tall figure with gray hair who just started shooting.”
Four years later, Karen still doesn’t know many of the details of those awful moments or what law enforcement discovered afterward about Kevin. “I haven’t read the police report. My PTSD counselor said he doesn’t think I should ever read it. I really don’t see a need to.”
There is one moment that Karen recalls with clarity and certainty; a moment she characterizes as lifesaving. “My mom was there; I know that” she says recalling her late mother’s voice and the intricate details when the police officer urged Karen to open the bathroom door. Terrified to let the officer in, what Karen heard was her mother’s voice speaking to her. “You’ve got to. You’ve got to open the door.” Karen quotes her mother. “As soon as I let the officer in, my mom was gone. I hold on to that because I’m going to see her again. I’m going to see Steve again. I know now that God left me here to help people. I believe that.”
When they met, Steve and Karen were quickly smitten with each other. “I met him when I was 30 and I was engaged to somebody else,” she shares with a quiet chuckle. Both were volunteering at a community event. “I fell in love, head over heels. It didn’t take long. I broke off my engagement.” In 2000, the couple moved into their home in Maitland, a suburb or Orlando, and built a lifetime of memories filled with family, friends, travel, football and fishing. They supported each other’s projects including Karen’s endless work with Athena NextGen, a non-profit organization that she co-founded ten years ago as a professional development resource for young executive women. From the beginning, Athena, which thrives today, has been Karen’s passion project. Steve’s career took off as well, especially after his leadership in the opening of the uber-successful Hard Rock concert arena in Orlando. He went on to manage one of the country’s top trade-show companies and to become a highly respected leader in the industry.
“He so loved the whole events and concerts world,” says Karen, adding that he was very well respected. ‘He really is greatly missed by so many.”
Handsome and armed with “the best sense of humor,” Steve always made Karen laugh. “We were good friends. He was my best friend. I still talk to him. I can honestly say I don’t think I’ve ever in my life loved anyone the way I love Steve and I miss him every day.” Some days there are moments that she especially misses.
“One of his favorite things was to take this godawful card table he had out onto the patio and set up his laptop. With his schematics for a show laid out on the table, as soon as he would see a squirrel, he would tell Bella “Get him, get him! And she would just take off. She never caught the squirrel, but he just got the biggest kick from that. I got an even bigger kick out of watching him do it.”
The hard reality of Steve’s death didn’t hit Karen until her release from the hospital three months after the shooting. Among other issues, her massive injuries caused her to lose strength and dexterity in her limbs. She couldn’t even press the sprayer on a can of deodorant. And she was wheelchair-bound. Day after day she worked with her occupational and physical therapists to relearn how to brush her hair, brush her teeth, put on socks, and eventually how to use the bathroom on her own, and of course, eventually walk again.
On the day of her hospital discharge Karen was in her room sobbing. “The gravity of Steve’s death hit me that morning.” Her heartbreak packed an even bigger punch when Christopher left her alone in the hotel room where she transitioned to as he oversaw getting her home repaired, finding a new rental house and managing the myriad of unanticipated demands associated with the tragedy. “I would be in the hotel by myself and that’s when it would really hit me. He was gone.”
“Honest to God, some days I don’t even know how I mentally got through all of that. I just don’t. The hospital was the only place I felt safe. I didn’t feel safe anywhere else.”
Karen, Steve and Christopher were well aware of Kevin’s mental health struggles, although no one ever imagined that he would take his anger to deadly extremes. They knew he had redirected anger against their mother onto Karen when she was placed in charge of their mother’s estate after her passing. Both Karen and Christopher had received threats from Kevin over the course of time. Karen and Steve changed the locks on their home and took numerous other security measures after his threats became beaded specifically on Karen. “We did all the things we felt we could do, but I never thought that he would do what he did. Never.”
Karen’s family worked to prevent any details being reported in local news coverage of the shooting, but word about what had happened was shared quietly among Steve and Karen’s friends. During her recovery she received volumes of mail, phone calls and texts of support and love from hundreds of people, which was initially just too overwhelming to deal with. As part of its investigation, police confiscated Karen’s phone. When it was returned, it would be months before she would consider touching it, reading text messages, or listening to voice mail messages. “I felt overwhelmed. I wasn’t ready for any outside communication. I had to do it on my terms. And then eventually, I was ready.” She says family members pressured her to start reading the notes thinking those would help ease her deep sorrow, but she knew she needed to do so on her own schedule.
Karen had already been seeing a therapist to help deal with her mother’s passing, which she found helpful. But the violent turn in her life created a much more complicated emotional challenge. “I couldn’t come to terms with everything that had happened,” she explains. “I didn’t even know that my brother was the shooter that night. I had no idea. I never saw the face of the person that came in the door.”
She participated briefly with a grief support group from her church, but she felt disconnected. The common thread of grief was present, but Karen’s circumstances were so profoundly different from the others that the experience, “…just wasn’t doing it for me.”
After a bit of research, Karen’s therapist encouraged her to try Everytown Survivors Network, a national non-profit organization that connects gun violence survivors with each other. Karen says she knew after her first group session and hearing stories from other victims that she “...had found my people.” They understand all the elements. This was a game changer for me.”
Especially uplifting, she adds, is her precious Bella, the now 13-year-old mixed breed dog the couple rescued from the side of a road when she was still a puppy, and who remains Karen’s true companion. “She’s gotten me through some of the hardest times,” Karen says. “My brother didn’t shoot her that night. I don’t know why.” Now, when Karen walks Bella, “We talk to Steve. It sounds weird but it’s comforting.”
Through her recovery and healing, Karen wondered just how much her mother actually knew about Kevin’s mental health status. “I think she knew more than she was willing to let on,” which for a while angered Karen and became an element to address in her therapy.
It’s no exaggeration that Karen’s physical and emotional recovery have been miraculous. Just a year after the shooting, she found herself back in the hospital due to serious complications related to the massive injuries she suffered. While there, she went into cardiac arrest and once again was saved by the medical team. And once again Christopher was there doing whatever he could to protect his sister.
Today, nearly four years later, Karen is steady, has relocated to a new home and is moving forward with purpose. “I’m still navigating. I know that while I had a great career in legal marketing, that’s not meaningful work. I think the reason I’m here is to do meaningful work.”
Fundamentally, she still finds great strength from Steve. She recalls that after attending one of the Athena NextGen luncheons, Steve was beaming with pride as he described what he witnessed and how he felt. “To watch the women’s faces as they were walking into the room; they were so happy and exhilarated. I finally know why you’re doing this,” says Karen recounting Steve’s enthusiasm. “He was really proud of me and that gives me joy.”
Like anyone grieving, Karen’s outlook can change day to day. “I used to have things to look forward to and I don’t feel that as much anymore. I don’t obsess about things the way I used to because the reality is that I know I’m going to be okay. I just know I’m going to be okay.”
Part of her healing and commitment effort to rebuilding a new life on her own has included reconnecting with friends. And like many who have lost their person, she has been saddened by old friends who have kept their distance because they simply don’t know what to say or do.
“They just don’t have the capacity to understand, so avoidance sometimes is where people go. It’s not because they don’t care. I really know who my real friends are; some of them wouldn’t have been the ones I would’ve thought, if that makes sense.”
Karen continues to work through her sorrow. She did not decorate her home at all during the two Christmas holidays after Steve’s death. She just didn’t have it in her. But then she thought about how much Steve loved the holidays, so now she decorates her house to the nines to celebrate Steve.
Like so many who endure the shock of losing a spouse unexpectedly, Karen was suddenly forced to begin a terrible new chapter in her life.
Karen says she is taking her time moving forward. “I’ve been struggling with just how best to use my time because I’m still a Type A personality.” After four years of dealing with the fallout from the trauma she experienced, Karen says she is focusing on a new purpose.
She has nearly completed writing a book about all that happened, but Karen emphasizes that the story is about resilience. She is also actively engaging with Everytown Survivor’s Network to advocate and help others with shared trauma. And she is preparing for a potential future run for the Florida state legislature.
“The book is more about picking up the pieces and moving forward. It’s about perseverance.” She believes there are options including spiraling down a rabbit hole or finding purpose. And today, her purpose is to honor Steve.
Here's the thing, she advises. “Trust your gut. We know what we’re ready to do when we’re ready to do it. You can’t let other people influence you,” adding, “Sometimes that’s hard because you’ve got a lot of other people that are wanting you to do things on their schedule; it’s not their fault, they just don’t understand.”
