Journalist Erika Mahoney became a character in a tragic story. She’s telling it in a new podcast.

March 22, 2021 started out as just “an ordinary Monday,” Erika Mahoney says. At the time, she was the news director at the local NPR station, KAZU. She was live on air for a pledge drive when she got a call from her mom in Boulder – odd, because her parents never called when she was live.

But there’d been a shooting at the neighborhood grocery store, King Soopers. And Mahoney’s dad had gone shopping.

We know the painfully familiar details of his normal shopping routine – him leaving the store with a cart full of groceries, then returning the empty cart – from Senseless, a podcast Mahoney hosts that premiered on Tuesday, June 17. She unfurls in incredible detail her dad’s routine errand, and how it forever changed her family story. She describes the agony of the unanswered phone calls, of watching the news live and seeing a man’s body in the parking lot and wondering whether she recognized the jacket.

Ten people were murdered in a mass shooting; Kevin Mahoney was among the dead.

“I still talk about my dad in the present tense – he’s still the best dad,” Mahoney says. “He and I were extremely close. It’s still hard that I couldn’t say goodbye.”

Overcome with grief, she eventually left her job at KAZU. She became a mom just a few months after her dad was killed, and her family – now four of them – moved back to her hometown of Boulder in 2024. Meanwhile, the world had moved on to the next news story, the next disruption of violence, just like Mahoney herself had done as a reporter covering a shooting at the Gilroy Garlic Festival in 2019. But for Mahoney and her family, it was still the raw reality of every day.

“I realized I was no longer a journalist covering this American tragedy,” she says in Episode 1. “I was living it.”

She spun her grief into something deeply personal and also deeply reported. The podcast production team includes two fellow former KAZU news directors, Krista Almanzan and Jerimiah Oetting.

Telling her own story has not come easily, but it has been positive. “I was worried I was going to tumble into this dark cave,” Mahoney says. “The result was the opposite; I felt so much lighter. There is something really powerful and healing about telling your own story.”

Listen to SENSELESS on any major podcast platform or at lemonadamedia.com/show/senseless.