A8
NEWS
Blue Mountain Eagle
Wednesday, September 7, 2022
Witnesses describe chaos, fear
about the man who aimed 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 walk-
ing 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 osteo-
arthritis, 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, scream-
ing 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 witnesses
to the Sunday, Aug. 28, shooting at
Safeway who are still trying to com-
prehend what happened when a gun-
man 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 vio-
lence. Others returned to the scene
Monday at U.S. Highway 20 and
NE 27th Street to share their stories,
wanting to speak to police, journal-
ists and anyone who would just stop
and listen. Some still bear the phys-
ical 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 company,
said Monday. “If we give him the
wrong type of attention, it’s just
going to inspire more people.”
Connor was approaching the
Safeway when he saw Shields run-
ning 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-
Shopper was armed and ready
Ryan Brennecke/The Bulletin
Emergency personnel respond to the shooting at The Forum Shopping Center
in east Bend on Sunday, Aug. 28, 2022.
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 Con-
nor and Shields into an apartment,
where nearly a dozen more people
stacked chairs and mattresses against
the doors and walls as a sense of ter-
ror 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
Monday. “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 daugh-
ter and his 4-year-old son. He pan-
icked 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 apart-
ment. But the next day, both Shields
and Connor came back to the scene,
arriving in diff erent parts of the shop-
ping 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 other’s phone
numbers and everything,” 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-can-
celing headphones would have pre-
vented him from hearing the gun-
shots, sending him directly into the
line of fi re.
But on Monday, 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 apartment
as she told them, again and again,
Molly Taroli, 40, had been shop-
ping 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 wom-
an’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, unpredictable world.”
As the shooting continued, Taroli
heard it moving closer. When she felt
the vibration of a round near her, Tar-
oli said she threw her shopping cart
to the side, in the hope of distract-
ing the shooter for enough time to
get away. When she got to the back
of the store, Taroli stood behind an
open door, holding her gun in case
the shooter came in that direction.
Neither Taroli nor her husband,
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 unconfi 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 protect and
serve. This is what they do every
day,” Taroli said.
Delivery driver heard shots
from parking lot
Minutes before Taroli reached
for her gun, Jordan Campbell, 34,
walked out of the same entrance the
gunman used to enter the store.
Campbell told The Bulletin on
Monday the scene reminded him
of his experience near a 2017 mass
shooting. He lived in Las Vegas at
the time and was working at a Veri-
zon Wireless store, just 2 miles from
where a gunman shot and killed 60
people at a music festival in what
became the country’s deadliest mass
shooting. Had Campbell taken his
normal route home the day of that
shooting, he would have been right in
its path, Campbell remembered.
“It’s just crazy to me personally
that this is the second one I’ve been
so close to, I guess,” Campbell said.
On Sunday, Campbell had been
fi lling an Instacart order at Safeway,
where he said he usually shops. He’d
parked in a diff erent spot than usual
— farther away from the store than
his typical spot — and went through
the self-checkout lane since the other
lanes were busy.
By the time he walked past the
shopping cart return, he heard the
fi rst few shots ring out from behind
him, inside the store.
“That’s when I heard what I
thought was fi reworks,” Campbell
said. “I started thinking to myself,
‘No way, that can’t be fi reworks from
inside the store.’”
By the time he got to his car,
Campbell heard a “barrage of shots.”
“Then people started spilling out
of both entrances there,” Campbell
remembered.
He stayed at the edge of the park-
ing lot as people continued rushing
from the store and as the scene lit up
with the lights from dozens of emer-
gency vehicles.
Campbell said the shooting in Las
Vegas fi ve years ago heightened his
awareness in public places.
“From that fi rst instance in Vegas,
it’s not paranoia, but it’s being super-
aware of all the exits, all the entry-
ways, how to get away if something
were to happen,” Campbell said.
Sunday’s shooting heightened that
awareness even further.
“I’m looking around way more.
Today it’s been more paranoia, like
now it can happen again,” Campbell
said, speaking to a Bulletin reporter
on the phone after having just fi n-
ished a shopping trip at Target with
his 4-year-old son Monday. “I just
feel like I’m looking over my shoul-
der a lot more today, and it’s defi -
nitely directly related to yesterday.”
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