Two Deadly Shootings Stun The Professional Beauty Community

Staff from Carenza Color Cutting Experience in their purple ribbons, which they are selling for $5 donations to a fund to help victims of the Azana Salon and Spa shooting. On Sunday October 21, Jan Seybold, who owns Carenza Color Cutting Experience in Brookfield, Wisconsin, with her husband Laurence, was finishing up some work while the cleaning crew was tidying up the salon after a busy week. She remembers hearing a number of sirens, but says she didn’t think much about it at the time—not until her daughter later called her to tell her about the deadly shooting incident at Azana Salon and Spa, which was literally across the parking lot from Carenza.

The tragedy at Azana happened just three days after a fatal shooting at a salon in Florida, and both occurred close to the one year anniversary of the shooting rampage at Salon Meritage in Seal Beach, California, which left eight people dead. In each case, the estranged partner of an employee of the salon or spa was the alleged shooter.

The Facts:

According to NBCnews.com, on Thursday, October 18, a gunman stormed into Las Dominicanas M & M Salon in Casselberry, Florida, just northeast of Orlando.  He fatally shot three women and injured a fourth, who was the salon manager and his ex-girlfriend. He fled to a friend’s home, where he later killed himself.  The salon manager, who was critically injured, had previously filed a restraining order against him.

Three days later in Wisconsin, the estranged husband of an employee of Azana stormed into the spa, ordered people on the ground and begun shooting. When police SWAT teams arrived at the scene, clients--barefoot and dressed in spa robes--were fleeing the scene, some with wounds. Three women were killed in shoot, four were injured, and the police found the shooter, who’d killed himself, in a treatment room.

Today, a message on the home page of the Azana website reads: Thank you to everyone in the community for your outpouring of love and support. We are devastated by this tragedy and remain in shock over how this could have happened. We will continue to update you as we have more details. In the meantime please keep the victims and their families in your thoughts and prayers.

Trying to Make Sense of the Senseless

For the Seybolds and their team, the tragedy hits close to home. “Not just physically, but within the world of beauty. This could have been any of our salons or spas,” she says. “And we all have such a caring, nurturing nature, as I talk to others in the salon community today, everyone wants to know what they can do to help.”