A woman who lost her fiancé in the 2012 Colorado movie theater shooting has since married one of the responding police officers in a tale of love that neither of them saw coming.
Some people will spend years planning their dream weddings, but we’ve seen so many stories of unlikely love that perfectly illustrate how little we really know what life will throw at us.
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And as those stories tend to show us, we can find that it’s only after things go horribly wrong that our journey towards happiness begins.
Although it’s certainly unexpected to hear about a bride marrying a wedding guest after the groom flees the ceremony, a couple’s love can similarly arise from life’s actual tragedies.
That indomitable spirit prompted one couple to get married far earlier than expected after a devastating diagnosis , while another wouldn’t have met at all if they hadn’t survived one of America’s darkest days together.
One woman’s story has a chilling similarly to these more serious tales and it gives us an understanding into how someone can find peace after a day that seems to take everything from them.
During a midnight screening of ‘The Dark Knight Rises,’ on July 20, 2012 in Aurora, Colorado, a gunman stepped into the theater and opened fire.
As People reported, his ensuing rampage would injure 70 people and claim the lives of 12, one of whom was 18-year-old Alexander J. Boik.
As we can see here, Boik would attend the screening with his fiancée, who then went by Lasamoa Cross. In the years before she changed her last name to Lanier, the incident would completely devastate her.
As she would later say in an Instagram message dedicated to Boik’s memory , “You know, I never finished college because I had the ambition to be a teacher with you.”
Years after serving as the resource officer for the woman’s high school, Cody Lanier responded to the shooting and had to break the news to her that Boik wasn’t on any hospital list.
But while he told 9News that he felt as though he had failed her , she gathered from the testimony of officers at the shooter’s trial that the trauma weighed as heavily on them as it did on her.
So as a way to help both them and herself heal, Lanier wrote letters to several testifying officers.
To Cody, she wrote, “I have always thought of you as a headstrong determined and courageous person for having the amount of strive to serve and protect Gateway, Aurora and your family. Every single day.”
As her letter continued, “And that alone has changed my life all together.”
As the officer put it when describing his reaction, “I don’t think I made it through three sentences in that thing and I’m tearing up.”
And while the two had intended to meet for lunch at Chipotle for an hour to process what they both experienced, that hour turned into four and before long, they felt themselves forming a connection.
In Cody’s words, “Beyond that it was just this connection. Every day since she turned into my best friend.”
That bond grew strong enough that they would eventually date and nine years after their first lunch, the couple would marry in October of 2021.
In that time, Lanier would take up photography as a means of capturing happy moments and grounding herself, which she then turned into her own business as a wedding photographer.
In Cody’s words, “Beauty from ashes, man. I don’t know what I would do without her.”
To commemorate how things started, the couple served Chipotle at their rehearsal dinner.
As Lanier put it on the couple’s wedding page, “The story started out so dark and so tragic, but since that day at Chipotle every day since has been the writing of the upmost beautiful and most unconventional love story ever told.”
h/t: 9News
