It seemed especially hard that morning to say goodbye, Aimee Dombo fs ’05 remembers.
She’d been home to Derby, Kan., that August weekend from New York City — where she had a new job as an assistant art director on the CBS television drama Madame Secretary — to celebrate her dad’s 63rd birthday and help her mom, Julie Dombo ’84, pick out the dress she’d wear to the Emmy Awards in September, when Julie would accompany Aimee, who was a nominee.
“You didn’t just drop me off at the airport that morning, but you walked me all the way in to the security gate,” Aimee says to her mom as she tells the story for a visitor. “We waved to each other four or five times. We just kept waving. And it was really hard for me to turn around and get on that plane.”
Julie remembers, too, and the tears start to fall. Just a day after she waved goodbye to her daughter, Julie would be shot during a Derby store robbery and later become a quadruple amputee.
Things had been going well for the Dombos until Aug. 11, 2015. Aimee, 31, who had spent more than two years studying theater and graphic design at Wichita State, was building an impressive résumé as a set designer with work on Broadway shows, including two nominated for Tonys; numerous off-Broadway, touring and regional stage productions; two live productions for NBC; an upcoming movie; and now a major TV drama.
In mid-July, her production team for Peter Pan LIVE!, NBC’s second live prime-time production, was nominated for an Emmy. Other nominees in the category of Outstanding Production Design for Variety, Nonfiction, Reality or Reality-Competition Programming were the 57th Annual Grammy Awards, the Oscars and episodes of The Voice and Portlandia. “I was going to be her date,” Julie says about their plans to attend the Emmys in Los Angeles in September, just a week before her 61st birthday. “She had been my date to the Tony Awards, she was my date for my first Broadway musical, and by golly, she was going to be my date for my first Emmy Awards show,” Aimee says.
After retiring in 2014 from a 21-year career as a middle school counselor in Haysville, Julie was transitioning into a part-time career that still involved working with kids. She had won over school district officials with her idea of volunteering as the district’s elementary and middle school truancy counselor two days a week. Officials felt the pilot program had been effective, and they wanted her back for the 2015-16 school year. She was to start Aug. 12.
Besides her work, Julie was looking forward to traveling more with her husband John, reading the two shelves of books she’d set aside to read in retirement and enjoying more visits with Aimee. “Your entire career has been spent helping kids go down the right path,” John reminds Julie. Initially, she taught at a Wichita Catholic elementary school, but an aunt who was a school counselor convinced her of the rewards in that role.
Julie received a Master of Education degree in counseling from WSU in 1984. While with USD 259 in Wichita, she started a weekly mentoring program for young boys who lacked positive male role models. In 1993, she started work in the Haysville schools.
In 2012, John retired from a more than 40-year career in food services, with the last 27 having been spent with Wichita Canteen Co., catering and working concessions for WSU Athletics and other clients. Aimee remembers helping sell lemon chillers at state high school track meets at Cessna Stadium and at Shocker baseball games in Eck Stadium for her dad. He kept his ties with athletics in retirement, bringing his Butler Community College culinary students to select Shocker events to observe how the event setup and catering processes work.
Both John and Julie are extremely proud of Aimee’s career. When Peter Pan LIVE! aired in December 2014, a local TV crew came to their home to film as they watched the show. “You don’t envision as your daughter is growing up that this is what they’re going to be doing,” John had told the NBC affiliate news crew. Julie’s comments seemed to indicate she’d had an idea that Aimee’s creative talents would take her far. After all, Aimee had written and starred in family home movies as a child, and then spent time in high school and during her college career working three summers with Music Theatre of Wichita.
Julie made sure to show the crew the striking, artistic self-portrait Aimee had produced in high school, noting that it was then that she realized her daughter could “really, really draw.”
It hadn’t taken Aimee long to break into the set design business after earning a bachelor’s degree, magna cum laude, in design/technical production in 2007 from the University of Arizona’s School of Theatre, Film & Television.
The same night she arrived in New York City with a suitcase, an air mattress, a lamp and her computer, she got a call from a set designer she knew, asking her to come to Times Square to help paint a floor. With John’s leadership acumen, having retired as a vice president, and Julie’s ability to encourage and nurture, they offered advice and guidance to help their daughter be successful.
The Dombos had always been close. That last weekend before Julie was shot, they remarked how it had been one of the best they’d shared, celebrating a family milestone and looking forward to new challenges. “We really formed a threesome,” Aimee says, recalling how her parents gave so much time and attention to their only child since adopting her when she was 3 days old.
But, Julie points out, she and John didn’t spoil her and made sure she learned how to help others and work hard. They made frequent trips back to Illinois, where Julie and John had grown up and met, so that Aimee could visit the family farm and experience chores such as plucking chickens. They all drew support from extended family holidays. Close as they were, the events and aftermath of Aug. 11 drew them even closer.
On Aug. 11, Julie was just finishing the four-mile speed-walking circuit she took every other day around Derby. She planned to make a quick stop at the local AT&T store to ask a question about her cell phone. “I’m not a very technical person,” Julie admits. She texted her sister at 9:08 a.m., just as she got ready to enter the store.
By 9:15 a.m., she had been shot twice, in the right lung and right forearm, by a gunman who had ordered her and the employees to a back room. Media stories reported Julie had refused to go, thinking for certain they’d all be killed.
At Wesley Medical Center in Wichita, surgeons removed two of the three lobes in her right lung, and she was placed on a double ventilator. She would be in a coma when her 39th wedding anniversary to John, Aug. 14, passed by. Subsequent poor circulation to her extremities caused necrosis in her hands and feet.
“When I first woke up, my first cognizant waking up in the hospital,” Julie says, “I looked down at my hands, and they were black. I had a trach in my mouth and I remember thinking, ‘I am in big trouble.’”
“The worst day in my entire life was when I and Julie’s cousin (an ER trauma doctor) had to tell Julie that her hands and her legs, 8 inches below the knee, would have to be amputated,” John says.
A Wichita plastic surgeon removed her hands Sept. 8, carefully preserving the nerves and muscles so that Julie could have the option of a future hand transplant. Two days later, she underwent amputation of her feet. “I feel fortunate that I’m alive, but look at what he took from me,” Julie says, raising her bandaged arms. “Every morning when I wake up, I look down and realize I can’t jump out of bed. To do anything, I need help.”
Instead of designing sets for Madame Secretary, Aimee — who is taking an extended break from her career — created signs of encouragement and milestone markers to decorate the walls of the rooms in the three Wichita hospitals where Julie stayed during recovery.
The three marvel at how much support they are receiving from family members and even strangers, including Matt Amos, an area veteran who lost his legs during an IED explosion in Afghanistan. He’s given Julie insight on living as an amputee. Several people whom the Dombos have touched, from school children in Haysville to John’s former colleagues, have conducted fundraisers. The money will help with medical costs and their loss of income as they focus on helping Julie improve her quality of life and receive the necessary care and resources, such as prostheses, mobility devices and adaptive living arrangements.
“What gets us through,” John says,“is Julie’s smile.”
Funds for Julie
Ken Lockwood, executive director of Eagle Valley Raptor Center in Cheney, Kan., has never met Julie Dombo. But like many other people, he was moved when he heard the story of her tragedy.
Lockwood has been selling chainsaw carvings of WuShock to raise money for charitable projects and nonprofits, including his Eagle Valley Raptor Center, a nonprofit with the purpose of rehabilitating injured birds of prey. For more info, visit eagleraptorcenter.org.
To help raise funds for Julie’s medical expenses, current and future, Lockwood has donated the 4-foot WuShock carving shown at left for a special auction. The carving is signed by Shocker men’s basketball coach Gregg Marshall.
The Dombo family also has set up a crowdsourcing account at gofundme.com/juliedombo.
