DAYTON, Ohio – Twice a day, Ronald McLeish Lee walks his small French bulldog through the Oregon District.

They walk up and down the cobblestone street in the popular entertainment area, then they sit under their favorite tree across from Ned Peppers Bar, where Lee likes to gaze east toward two church steeples.

“Everybody comes here,” Lee said, referring to the Oregon District as the artery of Dayton. Except, now, that artery has been “torn, cut, shot.”

On Aug. 4, Dayton became No. 251 on a list of U.S. mass shootings in 2019. A 24-year-old man brought a rifle to the Oregon District. He shot and killed nine people, including his sister, and injured 27 more. And then, 30 seconds after it began, police shot and killed him.

Before the shooting, Dayton was best known as the home of Orville and Wilbur Wright. There’s a U.S. Air Force base and an Air Force museum nearby. It’s a small-town kind of place where, pre-shooting, the big news on the city website was about designing a new flag.

That’s all changed now.

A lot has happened in the last week. There have been vigils and protests and political back and forth. And now, families are starting to bury their dead.

Hundreds crammed into a church in Springfield on Saturday to celebrate Derrick Fudge, who at 57 was the oldest of the victims. The line to get into the church stretched out the door and down the block, with traffic slowing to a crawl as mourners looked for a place to park.

Cars were going down the block, but one woman screamed as she drove past. “Are you serious?” she shouted out her window. “This big? For a black person?”

But inside, the standing-room-only congregation was focused on love.

“We didn’t come here with any vengeance in our heart,” said Twyla Southall, Fudge’s sister. “You just gotta keep on loving. ... Even when people are set on doing wrong, you have to do right.”

Southall gave Fudge’s eulogy, and she told a story about her brother giving a gift card to a woman who needed it to pay for her prescription. “He didn’t have a lot,” Southall said, “but he would give you what he had.”

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She read aloud the names of the other victims, asking the church to pray for them and their families.

Megan Betts. Lois Oglesby. Logan Turner. Nicholas Cumer. Thomas McNichols. Beatrice Warren-Curtis. Monica Brickhouse. Saeed Saleh.

“We are doing this today,” Southall said. “But somewhere, there’s eight other families that have to do the same thing.”

At the Islamic Cemetery of Greater Dayton, a new widow clung to a white hard hat covered in squiggly signatures.

Zaid Eseyas Nuguse met her husband, Saeed Saleh, in Sudan. Both were refugees.

Saleh left his home country of Eritrea, crossing the Sahara Desert and war zones to find refuge in the U.S.

“He made it to America to be in a safe place,” Mohamed Al-Hamdani said at a gathering shortly after Saleh was buried.

Nuguse would later cradle that hard hat, a gift from Saleh’s co-workers at DHL. Islom Shakhbandarov, who owns a business near where the shooter opened fire, stood nearby as Nuguse quietly cried. He acknowledged the tremendous suffering but said the tragedy in the Oregon District will ultimately unite people.

“It’s one of the safest places,” he said, “where all kinds of people can come together.”

Saturday morning, nearly a week after the shooting, the Oregon District was just starting to wake up for the day. A small group of artists was in the area, sketching the neighborhood. The Urban Sketchers bounce around the city, said Penne Miller, but on this Saturday, they intentionally went to the Oregon District.

“There’s no way we’re going to let one nut job make this off limits,” Miller said. “We’ll be out here, business as usual. I’m not afraid of this area.”

Miller knows Dayton will always be the place where the shooting happened. But she hopes that, eventually, her city will be better known for its true value. She gushes about the art and dining scenes and about how Dayton is just small enough that people still say hello on the sidewalk.

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As she sketched on Saturday, bikers and joggers zipped past on their morning workouts. A man walked his dog down the street and couples strolled by with cups of coffee.

A block or so away, a small crowd was gathered in front of Ned Peppers Bar at a memorial to the victims. Strangers hugged. Some left flowers. Others just stood in silence.

A funeral is an ordinary thing.

A casket, flowers, photos, laughter and tears. A final goodbye that is sorrowful but ultimately a regular part of life.

But this?

This is not ordinary.

Follow Hannah K. Sparling and Max Londberg on Twitter: @hksparling and @MaxLondberg