REGION
A8 — THE OBSERVER
THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 1, 2022
Witnesses to Bend shooting describe chaos, fear
the gun directly at her face.
“I wanted to go back and help
more,” he said. “I did all I could
in the situation. I wish I could
have done more, but it needed to
be done. That family sprung into
action as quickly as I did. Bend’s
got good people.”
By ZACK DEMARS, BRYCE DOLE
and ANNA KAMINSKI
The Bulletin
BEND — Ray Shields was
walking through the parking
lot of the Safeway on Bend’s
east side to buy a macaroni and
cheese dinner when the rattle
of gunfi re fi lled his ears. The
62-year-old Bend resident, who
walks with crutches due to his
osteoarthritis, spun around
and fl ed when a man nearby
screamed: “live shooter.”
Shields could hear the words
of his Marine Corps drill
instructor in his head from
decades ago, screaming and
swearing at him to run faster,
faster. Shields picked up his
crutches and sprinted maybe 30
feet before his hips gave out.
He collapsed to the asphalt and
started to crawl.
Shields is among the wit-
nesses to the Sunday, Aug. 28,
shooting at Safeway who are still
trying to comprehend what hap-
pened when a gunman entered
the store and opened fi re on
shoppers with an AR-15-style
rifl e, killing two people and
injuring two others.
Some witnesses stayed awake
through the night, scrolling
through the news articles and
internet threads and reading the
rumors, trying to fi nd some way
to make sense of the violence.
Others returned to the scene
Aug. 29 at U.S. Highway 20 and
Northeast 27th Street to share
their stories, wanting to speak
to police, journalists and anyone
who would just stop and listen.
Some still bear the physical and
emotional marks that come with
the traumatic event and have
only just begun what will be a
long, perhaps endless, process of
healing.
One woman in the store
pulled a gun she’s carried for
years from her purse just for
this possibility. Another man
watched survivors stream out
of the store, recalling another
previous close call with gun
violence.
“Nothing justifi es this. That’s
it,” Travis Connor, a 31-year-old
employee at a local solar com-
pany, said. “If we give him the
Shopper was armed, ready
Molly Taroli, 40, had been
shopping with her husband for
about 10 minutes before the
shooting started. They were
walking down the store’s front
aisle, behind the registers, when
they heard shots, followed by a
woman’s scream.
Taroli bolted for the back
of the store while her husband
ran out the front, to get his own
weapon from his truck. As she
went, Taroli gripped the gun she
kept in her purse. She said she’s
been carrying it for the past sev-
eral years.
“This is the exact reason
why,” Taroli said. “It’s because
we live in a very unsafe, unpre-
dictable world.”
As the shooting continued,
Taroli heard it moving closer.
When she felt the vibration of a
round near her, Taroli said she
threw her shopping cart to the
side, in the hope of distracting
the shooter for enough time to
get away. When she got to the
back of the store, Taroli stood
behind an open door to the store,
holding her gun in case the
shooter came in that direction.
Neither Taroli nor her hus-
band, who she found safe at the
front of the store when police
arrived, fi red any shots at the
shooter, who police said took his
own life. She pointed to mental
health systems lacking resources
and being too forgiving, and not
the shooter’s apparent access
to guns, as the cause of the
shooting, alluding to uncon-
fi rmed rumors that Ethan Blair
Miller, 20, had posted disturbing
journal entries for months
leading up to the shooting.
She also lauded the bravery of
fi rst responders who ran onto the
scene.
“It made me appreciate even
more those whose duty is to pro-
tect and serve. This is what they
do every day,” Taroli said.
H H H H H H
Ryan Brennecke/The Bulletin
Emergency personnel respond to a shooting at The Forum Shopping Center in east Bend on Sunday, Aug. 28, 2022.
wrong type of attention, it’s just
going to inspire more people.”
Connor was approaching the
Safeway when he saw Shields
running in a zig-zag pattern,
apparently trying to avoid bullets
fl ying through the air. Nearby,
Connor saw Safeway employees
pouring out of the grocery store.
Connor took off his noise-can-
celing headphones when another
burst of gunshots rang out. He
leaned down to Shields and said:
“Don’t hate me for this.”
Connor threw Shields over his
shoulder and sprinted down the
street. They ran nearly 100 yards
before they ducked behind the
tires of a parked Ford F-150.
Neighbors shelter fl eeing
survivors
A woman, speaking loud and
urgent orders in Spanish, pulled
Connor and Shields into an
apartment, where nearly a dozen
more people stacked chairs and
mattresses against the doors and
walls as a sense of terror and
foreboding fi lled the room.
Inside, a woman in her late
teens told the group that the
shooter had pointed his AR-15
style rifl e directly at her. She
repeated to them again and
again: “He pointed the gun
directly in my face.” Then, she
began to vomit in the bathroom.
“There’s no amount of
therapy that can fi x that,” Shields
refl ected. “She’s going to be
messed up for life … When she
closes her eyes, that’s all she’s
gonna see.”
Another man was in the
apartment with his wife, his
2-year-old daughter and his
4-year-old son. He panicked that
they were now trapped in the
apartment and their only exit, the
front door, was blocked. Connor
and Shields opened the window
for the man, took the screen out
and helped his children out of the
apartment, and they ran.
The group kept the lights
off in the apartment as the sun
went down and the light faded.
As the night wore on, they were
able to exit the apartment. But
the next day, both Shields and
Connor came back to the scene,
arriving in different parts of
the shopping center, hoping to
speak with someone.
The two are processing the
moment diff erently. But in that
chaos, the adrenaline and horror
seem to have created a bond
between Connor and Shields.
“We had never met before in
our lives, but we became very
good friends. We got each oth-
er’s phone numbers and every-
thing,” Shields said, adding:
“When you’re over someone’s
shoulder and running from a
live-fi re situation, you get to be
friends real quick.”
For Connor, he knows that it
was actually Shields who saved
his life. Without seeing Shields
running away, it’s possible that
his noise-canceling headphones
would have prevented him from
hearing the gunshots, sending
him directly into the line of fi re.
But on Aug. 29, standing
near the caution tape outside the
Safeway, what stuck in Connor’s
head was not running across
the street with Shields over his
shoulder. It was the sound of
the woman’s voice in the apart-
ment as she told them, again and
again, about the man who aimed
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