Victim impact statements are an important part of the criminal sentencing process.

After guilt has been decided but before a sentence is delivered, there is a period when the depth of the damage is demonstrated via statements — written or read or bravely spoken — by those keenly affected.

With the trial of Pittsburgh synagogue shooter Robert Bowers, there were so many lives lost Oct. 27, 2018, that the impact on the victims is staggering. They lost mothers and fathers, brothers and friends.

The monthslong trial in its three phases along the path to Thursday’s death sentence was an opportunity to hear those accounts drawn out in different ways at different times.

Andrea Wedner spoke about the last moments of her mother, Rose Mallinger, and her own pain and fear. Before U.S. District Judge Robert J. Colville sentenced Bowers to death, the morning was an emotional litany of the pain dealt by the shooter’s rage, hatred and bullets to the people who bear the brunt.

That impact was the most critical to the moment — the center of Bowers’ terrible actions.

But an event such as the shooting that killed Mallinger, Joyce Fienberg, Richard Gottfried, Jerry Rabinowitz, Cecil and David Rosenthal, Bernice and Sylvan Simon, Dan Stein, Melvin Wax and Irving Younger cannot be contained by the close ring of friends and family. All that spilled blood and overflowing pain spreads outward. The stain grows fainter as it travels, but it remains indelibly there.

The attack on the Congregation Dor Hadash, New Light Congregation and Tree of Life-Or L’Simcha congregation, all at worship on that Saturday morning, was an attack on all Jews because it was an attack on any Jew who crossed Bowers’ path. He had no specific person in mind when he picked up his weapons and pushed through those doors. It could have been anyone, and so everyone was a target.

It was an attack on Pittsburgh. The city and the region came together under the banner of Pittsburgh Strong, but we will not forget the police response, the days of funerals or the 11 Star of David markers on a Squirrel Hill street anytime soon. When new shootings happen in other cities, that wound oozes fresh pain.

The sentencing brings an end to more than four years of suspended animation as collective breath was held and collective hunger for justice gnawed.

But the impact remains on victims, from the injured to the families, just like the graves of the dead.

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