For Alek Skarlatos, Thursday’s deadly shooting at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Oregon, hit very close the home.
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Dance show: Ellen urged Skarlatos & DWTS partner Lindsay Arnold to return & dance on the showSkarlatos has-been learning at the community college for a profession in law enforcement.
Skarlatos, assigned to an infantry unit in Roseburg, Oregon, was also chosen to compete on this season’s “Dancing With the Stars”.
Shortly after leaving the studio, he tweeted, “Everyone send prayers out to ucc”. He was enrolled at Umpqua Community College prior to being deployed to Afghanistan in 2014.
Army Spc. Alek Skarlatos, 22, and his two friends, Airman 1st Class Spencer Stone and Anthony Sadler, were awarded medals from the United States and France and met in the Oval Office with President Obama after they helped stop a man armed with an automatic rifle and a box cutter who had started firing on a Paris-bound train. I would have been there today if I didn’t agree to do this show. “I wish that I could have been there today to assist”.
In a new interview in Ellen DeGeneres, the Dancing With The Stars contestant even reveals he would have been in class on the UCC campus had he not signed up for the reality competition series. Wow.
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“My heart really goes out to the people who can’t say the same”, he said. “My response here at this podium ends up being routine, the conversation in the aftermath of it. We have become numb to this”, the President said. There have been 294 mass shootings in the 274 days of the year so far, which includes 44 other school shootings and an attack at a June screening of Trainwreck in Lafatyette, Louisiana. “It’s not enough – it does not capture the heartache and grief and anger that we should feel, and it does nothing to prevent this carnage from being inflicted a few place else in America next week or a couple months from now”, Obama said.
