Stacy Hanson, who survived the 2007 mass shooting at Salt Lake City’s Trolley Square and was left paralyzed from the waist down, died this month at age 70, according to his family’s online obituary.
Hanson, described in the obituary as the world’s “kindest, most caring, most lovable curmudgeon,” seemed to make an impression on everyone he met. Before he was shot, he was an avid outdoorsman, his wife, Colleen Hanson, said. He was an “excellent” horseback rider, fly fisherman, mountain biker, hiker and more. “He loved going backpacking with his buddies.”
He graduated from Utah State University in pre-law and history and the University of Utah in journalism before moving to Reno, Nevada, where he entered the advertising world as a copywriter and creative director.
“He was really a gifted writer,” Colleen said.
In 1995, he returned to Salt Lake City and met his wife, the “love of his life,” his obituary states.
“He was an incredible husband. He was always thoughtful and kind and a true gentleman,” Colleen said. And his loved his stepchildren like they were his own.
(Paul Fraughton | The Salt Lake Tribune) Colleen and Stacy Hanson, photographed in their Salt Lake City home on Feb. 6, 2012, spoke about how their lives changed after Stacy was shot at Trolley Square in 2007.
Trolley Square shooting
Hanson’s life was permanently changed Feb. 12, 2007, when he was shot three times while picking out a Valentine’s Day card for Colleen at Trolley Square. The shooting left five dead and three others, including Hanson, wounded.
“Unfortunately, like so many other innocent victims in mass shootings,” his obituary states, “Stacy became another number in the growing epidemic of gun violence.”
Just before he was shot, Hanson tried to negotiate with the gunman. “I asked him not to shoot me,” Hanson recounted days later to then-Salt Lake Tribune humor columnist Robert Kirby, while still hospitalized. “I told him that I had a wife and kids, and that everyone in here just wanted to go home to their families.”
In a moment when Hanson had “given up” at the hospital, wracked with survivor’s guilt, Colleen smuggled their Chihuahua, Popeye, into the hospital’s intensive care unit to make Hanson smile and laugh again, Kirby wrote.
“She’s been my constant reality check,” Hanson told Kirby in 2012. “When I start to get depressed or too self-absorbed, she calls me on it. ... She’s tough.”
Hanson had to use a wheelchair for the rest of his life, his obituary said. He underwent more than 30 surgeries, Colleen said, and dealt with constant, debilitating pain, even up until the end.
“I don’t think he ever really got over the shooting,” she said. “... It haunted him every day, I know that, despite counseling.”
She said Hanson felt especially sorry for the younger victims, whose lives were just beginning.
The 2012 Sandy Hook shooting “really affected him,” Colleen added. “He was pretty amazed that we would allow continued assault weapons on the street after Sandy Hook.”
‘Grateful for little things’
Hanson didn’t want the shooting “to be the focus of the rest of his life,” Kirby wrote, adding that the couple always relied on humor to cope — even more so after that February evening.
“Before I got shot, Colleen and I were doing whatever we wanted in life,” Stacy told Kirby in 2012. “That night changed our relationship in every way.”
Colleen said at the time that they were “grateful for little things.”
During the pandemic, the Hansons started fostering kittens, feeding and caring for them. “He had a real sweet, tender side that way,” she said. He was an “animal person.” The couple had two cats and a standard poodle at the time of his death.
Hanson had planned to travel to Colorado just before he died to see a specialist for his back. He was supposed to have surgery that would’ve hopefully alleviated some of his pain, but he didn’t make it, Colleen said. “He was really looking forward to having that.”
Hanson was thankful he had survived Trolley Square, because it gave him “more time on the planet with his family and friends,” Colleen said. “He just wasn’t ready to tell everybody goodbye.”