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PAWTUCKET, Rhode Island — Moments after shots rang out in the stands at a high school hockey game, Amanda Wallace-Hubbard locked eyes with her estranged father Robert Dorgan, who was dressed like a woman and brandishing a freshly fired handgun.
He had just shot dead her brother and stepmother and critically wounded her step-grandparents.
In a moment of white-hot panic she was convinced she and her young sons would be the next victims of the unfolding rampage, she told The Post.
“I turned around and Rob was looking into my eyes, and I really felt like we were next,” she said.
The family members who survived the transgender madman’s hockey rink massacre said that he intended to wipe out his entire family — and was only stopped by the brave intervention of bystanders and his own son, Aidan, who died a hero as he attempted to wrestle the gun from his deranged father’s hands.
“I wouldn’t be here today if it wasn’t for him, because he quite literally saved my life. I know for a fact that that man was coming for me next, and he wanted all of us gone,” Aidan Dorgan’s fiancée, Starr Sroka, who was sitting in the audience, said.
“And if it wasn’t for Aidan getting up and trying to get that gun away from his father and trying to protect his mom, I wouldn’t have been able to run and I probably wouldn’t be here.”
Dorgan, 56, stormed the Dennis M. Lynch Arena in Pawtucket armed with a pair of handguns and said nothing as he walked over to his family in the stands and started firing.
He killed his ex-wife, Rhonda and then Aidan and critically wounded her parents, Gerald and Linda, as well as a family friend.
The Post asked Wallace-Hubbard, 36, what she saw when she met her killer father’s gaze.
“It feels very odd to say this, but I felt like I saw him communicating deep sadness. I know that’s probably not what people want to hear. I get it, but there’s some deep, deep sadness in his eyes,” she said when asked what she saw when their eyes met.
“I was sitting on the bottom bench with my son, and when I initially turned around, I witnessed him shooting my brother, and then I ducked for cover on top of my sons,” she said.
“I was really in fear for my son’s lives. At the time when the good Samaritans stepped in and really incapacitated him, we were the only members of the family who had not been shot.”
Although Wallace-Hubbard admitted to feeling “conflicted” about what his motive may have been in that moment, she said “I just feel logically we may have been next.”
After fleeing the arena with her sons, she said her initial concern was to let people know that the shooting was anything but random.
“Our family was specifically targeted. My goal at the time was to reassure the public that it was a targeted, isolated incident,” she said.
Sroka, 23, who was set to wed Aidan next year, said she fled for her life once she saw the gun, but her fiancé stayed behind and sacrificed himself to protect the rest of his family from his deranged father.
“I waned him to run so badly, but I knew his main thing was making sure his family was safe and unfortunately that took his life as well. I didn’t even get to say anything to him before I bolted. I just saw the gun and ran. I know he knew that I left,” she told The Post.
Sroka said she didn’t even know the love of her life had been shot until she met up with someone who saw him take a bullet in the back.
“[Aidan] was like the father of the family that these kids didn’t have towards their adult life, and he didn’t want to let his dad take hold of his life like that. The family just didn’t want him to defeat their purpose in life,” she said.
“He loved with so much of his heart and so much of his soul. He loved his family, he loved me, he loved Jesus Christ. He was the most lovable, caring, do-anything-for-anybody person.”
She said despite his tumultuous relationship with his deeply disturbed father, Aidan always tried to see the good in people, including him.
“Even though he knew his dad had mental issues and disorders, he never thought he would do something like that to his own family. He thought he was too much of a coward.”
She disagreed, ominously warning Aidan “I think he’ll do it, and then hurt people and then take his own life, and won’t care that he did it.”
Sroka speculated that Dorgan’s deep sense of alienation left him deeply embittered toward the family.
“He just had severe mental illness, and he just didn’t want to see his family move on, away from him and be happy. He wanted them to fall down the same spiral that he fell down. He just had very bad mental illnesses, and he didn’t want to get help,” she said.
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