After mass shooting, they found fortitude and friendship

PITTSBURGH (AP) —

Dan Leger and Tim Matson started their lives over in a hospital, slowly rebuilding their physical strength and finding the fortitude to learn how to walk again after both were seriously wounded during the Tree of Life synagogue shooting in 2018 that left 11 people dead.

As they healed, they formed a friendship.

Mr. Leger, 73, is a third-generation nurse and hospital chaplain who was at the Squirrel Hill synagogue to worship on that Oct. 27. As he lay in intensive care after being shot in the torso, his wife, Ellen, told him Officer Matson, the Pittsburgh SWAT officer who saved his life, was recuperating on the same floor, just down the hall.

So, Mr. Leger set a physical therapy goal — to walk to the officer’s room so he could thank him.

He made it there one day, but the officer was out of the room. He told himself, “OK, this is a practice run.”

Mr. Leger later walked, with the help of his walker, back to the officer’s room, and, “We saw each other as human beings.”

Officer Matson had been shot seven times. For 12 weeks, he said during a phone interview, “My left arm was in an external fixator,” which he described as “two rods that they screw into your forearm and upper arm. It keeps your arm bent.

“I learned to walk again. My left arm is damaged. They rebuilt my elbow. I had to get some function back in my left elbow,” he added.

His hometown of McKees Rocks, where he grew up in the Bottoms neighborhood of Presston, held a fundraiser for him. Letters poured in regularly from people he did not know.

“I got a letter from people in Israel. And Ireland. My hospital room was just covered in letters. They were all on my wall in my room, from different states,” he said.

“The overwhelming support that I got...