SHAWNEE, Kan. — She’s A Pistol gun shop will take a second shot at business Friday morning, when it re-opens for the first time since the deadly shooting inside the shop last month.
Co-owner Jon Bieker was killed in an exchange of gunfire with four men prosecutors say tried to rob the store. But his wife, Becky Bieker, told Fox 4 she’s not going to let the tragedy keep her from re-opening the store she and Jon built together.
“It will be bittersweet,” Becky said. “I’ve been looking forward to re-opening. I miss my customers, we miss our friends. But at the same time, it will be hard to do that without Jon.”
Becky said it’s the little things she’ll miss the most.
“Just knowing he’s there,” she said, “and his smile. It was not uncommon for him to just come up behind me and make sure I was okay. He’d know I was fine, but he’d come up and just let me know he was there, and that won’t happen.”
When she thinks about that fateful January day, Becky said she remembers the robbery clearly and that “there are some things that you can never un-see.”
Some memories she wishes she could forget.
“A lot of anger,” she said of the emotions she feels thinking about the robbery. “There’s of course sadness and heartbreak that Jon was taken from me, and taken in a very violent way. But there’s a lot of honor that someone loved me enough to be willing to do that for me.”
Becky remembers Jon as a man who always put her first, who protected her until the very end, and who now inspires her to wake up each day and keep going.
“He was the one that was my rock, my foundation,” she said. “It would be very easy for me to have been broken by this experience, but he would not want that, and I won’t let that happen.”