DAYTON, Ohio — First, the Ku Klux Klan came to town. Two days later, tornadoes destroyed hundreds of homes and businesses and obliterated entire neighborhoods in and around the western Ohio city of Dayton.
Then this past weekend, a gunman stormed onto a crowded sidewalk in the entertainment district — an area of town typically swarming with revelers who stay until the bars close in the early morning — and fired at least 41 shots into the crowd, killing nine people before he was shot dead by the authorities.
“Something just keeps happening,” said Amanda Hensler, an owner of a store, Heart Mercantile, that is across the street from where the massacre took place.
The day after the mass shooting — the second within a 13-hour period in America — residents flocked to Ms. Hensler’s store to buy T-shirts that read “Dayton Strong,” which has become something of a motto for this grieving, shocked city. The customers knew that the store would have them in stock because they had been printed three months earlier, after the catastrophic tornado outbreak.
Indeed, Dayton has been through a brutal six-month stretch, even before the Klan held a rally at the city’s downtown Courthouse Square. Since the beginning of February, the city has also endured a large infrastructure failure and federal indictments at City Hall.
