By Jesse Ellison
Photos by Sofia Aldinio
From our October 2024 issue
To understand why Justin and Samantha Juray felt they had no choice other than the hardest choice, it’s important to understand that their business, Just-In-Time Recreation, in Lewiston, is more than a bowling alley. “A family within a family” is how Samantha described it one recent afternoon, during a rare moment when she was able to take a break from her endless to-do list to sit down and talk. The place was quiet, as it often is in the middle of summer, when everyone is off at the lake or at camp. That’s perfectly ordinary. What’s extraordinary is that Just-In-Time was open at all.
Last year, on October 25, a man armed with an assault-style rifle walked through the door of the bowling alley and opened fire. Then, he left and drove across town and started shooting again, inside Schemengees Bar & Grille. In less than 20 minutes, he murdered 18 people — ranging in age from 14 to 76 — and wounded 13 others, before later killing himself. It was one of the 10 deadliest mass shootings in America’s long history of unchecked gun violence.
In the early, eerie days after the shootings, nobody would have predicted that Just-In-Time might ever reopen. Not the bowlers, many of whom had been coming there since before they could even remember. Not the staff. Not the Jurays, a young couple who had bought the place two years earlier because they loved it and didn’t want to see it go out of business. And certainly not anyone watching from afar. The odds of a mass-shooting site reopening to the public are vanishingly low. Many are razed, while some, like Schemengees, quietly cease to exist. When I drove by, the signage was gone, no trace of what had once been there.
The shooting occurred on a Wednesday evening, which is when the youth bowling league plays at Just-In-Time. The place was full of kids. The Jurays were both there that night — Samantha working, Justin bowling with his dad. Justin, like a lot of folks, practically grew up on those lanes, and he had started taking his own kids from the time they were babies. The Jurays purchased the business after the previous owners announced imminent shuttering of what was then called Sparetime Recreation. The deal was finalized just two days before the lanes had been slated to close. The Jurays changed the name to Just-In-Time, because that’s how it had all come together.
In the days after the shooting, the couple couldn’t imagine ever setting foot in there again. They’d known every person who died at Just-In-Time on October 25, and they knew most of them well. Two of their employees were among the deceased. They’d seen everything unfold as if caught in a nightmare. Samantha was behind the long counter that surrounds the kitchen, just opposite the front door. Justin was in a lane, and he lost track of his phone and of Samantha in the chaos. He spent hours agonizing, not knowing whether she got out alive. Going back there, trying to find any normalcy, seemed impossible.
But then, Justin started having dreams about Bob Violette, the coach of the youth league, whose animating passion was getting kids involved in bowling and who, probably more than anyone, had been over the moon when the Jurays saved the bowling center from going out of business. He and his wife, Lucy, were both shot and killed. Now, he was urging Justin to reopen, for the sake of the kids. Justin was hardly getting any sleep to begin with, Samantha remembered. “He was like, ‘Okay, okay, Bob. Let me sleep.’”
Clockwise from top left: Customers gathering around the bar at the reopened alley; owners Justin and Samantha Juray; longtime employee Tom Giberti standing and chatting with fellow bowlers between frames; Josh D’Alfonso, head mechanic at Just-In-Time.
Over time, the idea of not reopening felt even worse to the Jurays, and that turned out to be true for a lot of people. Justin went to see Tom Giberti, the alley’s longest-tenured employee. Giberti is in his 70s and started working at the lanes more than two decades ago, after a career as a machinist. He has tried, unsuccessfully, to retire three different times — his understanding of how all the old equipment functions keeps proving irreplaceable. The moment the shooting started, he was back behind the pins, where the big, clanking machinery resides, looking for a screwdriver he could use to pry open one of the lockers. It’s so loud back there that he had no idea anything was wrong until he walked back out and into “two-point-five minutes of sheer terror,” as he described it to me. “If you weren’t here, you can’t even begin to imagine what it was like that night. And you can’t explain it to anybody.”
Giberti, seeing a group of terrified children running his way, herded them toward the back, diving on one of them to shield her body with his own, getting shot seven times in the process. EMTs were on the scene within minutes and got him to the hospital in time to save his life. When Justin came to ask if they should reopen, Giberti didn’t hesitate. “Absolutely,” he told him. “Otherwise, he wins.”
Cassandra Violette, wife of Bob and Lucy Violette’s son John, said the idea that her father-in-law badgered Justin to reopen even after his death “totally is Bob.” Initially, she didn’t want to go anywhere near the place, and she and John would go out of their way to avoid driving by the whole area. But eventually, she said, they began to realize that there was no question what Bob and Lucy would have wanted. “It would have been easy for Sam and Justin to just say, ‘After what happened here, we can never reopen,’” Cassandra said. “It takes a lot of courage.”
After the Jurays announced that they intended to reopen, some online commenters chimed in to say they could never set foot in the place and didn’t understand how anyone could feel otherwise. Samantha got messages from strangers saying they were destined to fail. Still, they forged ahead. Over the course of six months, with a lot of help from family and friends, they gave the space a massive overhaul, painting the entire interior and replacing all of the floors. The Bowling Proprietors Association of America and Brunswick Bowling, an Illinois-based company that makes bowling equipment and supplies, organized to donate a new scoring system, gutters, bumpers, and monitors. Samantha’s dad was there so often helping out that she eventually insisted on putting him on payroll. She, meanwhile, worked part-time as a teller at Bangor Savings Bank, a job she went back to the week after the shooting. She didn’t want to sit at home and fixate on the tragedy, she said, and she no longer had an income otherwise.
A few days after the shooting, she needed to go back to Just-In-Time because the state police accidentally locked her keys inside and her dad had brought her his extra set so she could let them in. Her dad hadn’t wanted her to go back in, but she insisted, telling him, “I’ve already seen this. Nobody else needs to see this.”
For months afterward, though, people close to one of the victims would sometimes ask to visit the alley. She’d meet them, let them in, and try to answer their questions. “But I don’t have a lot of answers,” she told me. “I have a lot of my own questions.” She began crying. “I’ve been told by my therapist that it’s good to cry,” she said, her voice quavering. “I’m like, ‘But I don’t want to cry, I hate crying!’” Now, she was laughing and crying both.
This past spring, as the Jurays got closer to opening again, Samantha reached out to the Maine Resiliency Center, a program that formed soon after the shooting in order to provide support and resources to people affected by the violence. The couple was looking for advice about how to handle welcoming people back in. “There isn’t a guidebook,” Danielle Parent, the program’s director, told me. “My job is to listen, without judgment, and to do the things that the community said that they need. We listened to what people were saying and the reality was that they were ready to open and people wanted that.”
On a Wednesday in April, Just-In-Time opened its doors, not to the general public initially, but to the first responders who had arrived at the scene of the shooting. Once that group left, people who had been bowling that night came in. The Jurays kept all the machines turned off and kept the kitchen closed. The whole space was silent. Grief counselors from the resiliency center were there, and nobody from the media was. At a preset time, the first responders came back in, and, a little later, and with plenty of advance warning for those in attendance, the staff turned everything on again.
Just like that terrible Wednesday six months prior, this Wednesday also saw the alley full of kids. “It was nerve-racking at first,” Samantha said. She remembers a long moment when nobody was sure what to do, or what would happen next. “And then one of the kiddos, he just got up and he just rolled the ball. Everybody just stared at him, and I think he got a strike, because everybody started cheering. Everybody was just crying and cheering and we were like, ‘Okay, this is going to be okay.’”
Nine days later, at the official reopening, open to the public and the press, some 500 people, including a slew of state and local officials, showed up. Governor Janet Mills, surrounded by a group of children, cut a ribbon with a giant pair of gold scissors. “Our hearts are still healing,” she told the crowd. “The road to healing is long. But today, Justin and Samantha are helping us all take a big step forward.” On the chalkboard surface above the shoe rental, Samantha had written, “Welcome, We Missed You! WE ARE SO HAPPY TO HAVE YOU BACK!” And underneath were words that someone had found in a fortune cookie in the days before opening and she thought seemed fitting: “There Is Nothing Permanent Except Change.”
Among the new touches are, above every lane, photographs of scenes around Lewiston. One features the familiar neon sign — “Hopeful” — installed on an old downtown mill in 2021. Giberti’s favorite is another, above lane eight, that shows a rainbow arcing over the city. “It was taken the day after the shooting,” he told me, choking up. He got a new tattoo to commemorate the lives lost: a bowling pin with four hearts on it and the date 10/25/23 inscribed underneath. He can’t talk about it without crying. The tattoo artist wouldn’t accept payment, and Giberti said that for the first few months after October 25, no matter where he went around town, he couldn’t pay for anything. Even nine months later, when he went for his regular haircut at Walmart, they waved him away when he reached for his wallet. Last winter, the Celtics honored him as part of its Heroes Among Us program, for people who have an outsize positive impact on their communities, and gave him, along with his two sons and Justin Juray, whom he’d brought along, seats on the floor.
There are other markers at Just-In-Time of what happened. Out front, three-foot-tall white letters spell out “Love Always Wins” — the outline of Maine, with a heart marking Lewiston, takes the place of the “O.” Inside, on a wall near the entrance, a poster reads, “We’ve been through the darkness. Let’s get back to the light!” a reference to both the shooting and the recent solar eclipse, one unfathomable low and one euphoric high, both felt acutely across the entire state. A book of photographs from the reopening sits on the counter. On two shelves near the shoe rental are 18 bowling pins, each inscribed with a name inside a heart. In the bar area, a table Samantha’s dad made is embedded with pictures of the eight people who were killed at the alley, their smiling faces gazing upward. Agrandece Dostie, who bowls and works at the alley, was best friends with Just-In-Time bartender Tricia Asselin, who died in the shooting. Dostie said every time she walks by that table, she taps her friend and says, “Boop!”
Josh D’Alfonso is the head mechanic at the bowling alley, and the only reason he wasn’t at work the night of the shooting was because he had left to go bowling with his parents in Portland. Just an hour earlier, though, he’d been bowling there with his two small children, the younger of whom, his son, was especially close to Thomas Conrad, an employee who was killed that night. D’Alfonso said he watched, not knowing what to do, as his son struggled in the aftermath, having such a hard time in school that D’Alfonso wanted him to repeat the grade. “He just didn’t know how to process any of it,” he said. “And how would he? He’s six years old.” But when Just-In-Time reopened, D’Alfonso said, his son immediately wanted to go. Now, he brings him as much as he can, because he’s seen that the more the kid goes, the more open he is, and the more comfortable he is talking about his friend Tom and what happened that night to people he loves in a place he loves.
Cassandra Violette goes to the alley every week, both to support the Jurays and because, in a way, she feels more connected to Bob and Lucy there. “In the beginning, it was hard to walk in,” she said. “In my mind, I’d be picturing it. We were there so many times with them. I know exactly where he would have been and where she would have been. It’s hard to go, but at the same time, we feel close to them being there.”
Samantha Juray left her job at the bank in July and got right back to working full-time at the alley, where she does a little bit of everything — one day hauling cooking oil out of the kitchen in five-gallon buckets, another holing up in the office doing paperwork, another mopping the floors. She has started thinking about the first anniversary of the shooting, how to mark the day at Just-In-Time. She had learned from the past year that, no matter what, somebody was going to be upset. But what has hurt worse is seeing the outside world move on, like it always will. “If you’re not directly impacted, it’s easy to forget,” she told me. “But we’ll never forget it. Life’s still got to go on, you know? But it will never be the same.” Then, she got right back to work.