Unruh’s “Walk of Death” also seemed to foreshadow Camden’s deeper decline. “It’s something you never really forget. . . . You take extra precautions to protect your family and your property,” Paul Schopp, a former director of the Camden County Historical Society, said in an interview to mark the sixtieth anniversary of the mass shooting. “He didn’t just rob them of their lives. He robbed them of their essence.” The trauma of a mass shooting, and a collective desire to forget, seems like the true beginning of Camden’s downward slope.
