AROUND OREGON
WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 31, 2022
HERMISTONHERALD.COM • A11
Witnesses to Bend shooting describe chaos, fear
BY ZACK DEMARS, BRYCE DOLE
AND ANNA KAMINSKI
The Bulletin
Ray Shields was walking
through the parking lot of the
Safeway on Bend’s east side Sun-
day, Aug. 28, to buy a macaroni
and cheese dinner when the
rattle of gunfire filled his ears.
The 62-year-old Bend resident,
who walks with crutches due to
his osteoarthritis, spun around
and fled when a man nearby
screamed: “Live shooter.”
Shields could hear the words
of his Marine Corps drill in-
structor in his head from de-
cades ago, screaming and swear-
ing at him to run faster, faster.
Shields picked up his crutches
and sprinted maybe 30 feet be-
fore his hips gave out. He
collapsed to the asphalt and
started to crawl.
Shields is among the wit-
nesses to the shooting at Safe-
way who are trying to compre-
hend what happened when a
gunman entered the store and
opened fire on shoppers with
an AR-15-style rifle, 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 find some way
to make sense of the violence.
Others returned to the scene
Aug. 29, wanting to speak to po-
lice, journalists and anyone who
would just stop and listen. Some
still bear the physical and emo-
tional marks that come with the
traumatic event.
“Nothing justifies this. That’s
it,” Travis Connor, a 31-year-old
employee at a local solar com-
pany said.
“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
running in a zig-zag pattern, ap-
parently trying to avoid bullets
flying 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
FLEEING 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 filled
the room.
Inside, a woman in her late
teens told the group the shooter
Fire kicks
up again at
Pendleton
flour mill
Ryan Brennecke/The Bulletin
Emergency personnel respond to the shooting at The Forum Shopping Center in east Bend on Sunday, Aug. 28, 2022.
had pointed his AR-15 style ri-
fle 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 ther-
apy that can fix that,” Shields
reflected. “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, Shields and Con-
nor came back to the scene,
arriving in different parts of
the shopping center, hoping to
speak with someone.
“We had never met before in
our lives, but we became very
good friends. We got each oth-
er’s phone numbers and ev-
erything,” Shields said, adding:
“When you’re over someone’s
shoulder and running from a
live-fire situation, you get to be
friends real quick.”
For Connor, he knows it was
actually Shields who saved his
life. Without seeing Shields
running away, it’s possible his
noise-canceling headphones
would have prevented him from
hearing the gunshots, sending
him directly into the line of fire.
But 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 wom-
an’s voice in the apartment as
she told them, again and again,
about the man who aimed the
gun directly at her face.
SHOPPER WAS ARMED
AND 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
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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 several 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, fired 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 shoot-
ing, alluding to unconfirmed
rumors that Ethan Blair Miller,
20, had posted disturbing jour-
nal entries for months leading
up to the shooting.
She also lauded the bravery of
first responders who ran
onto the scene.
“It made me appreciate even
more those whose duty is to
protect and serve,” Taroll said.
“This is what they do every day.”
DELIVERY DRIVER HEARD
SHOTS FROM PARKING LOT
Minutes before Taroli reached
for her gun, Jordan Campbell,
34, walked out of the same en-
trance the gunman used to en-
ter the store.
Campbell said the scene re-
minded him of his experience
near a 2017 mass shooting. He
lived in Las Vegas at the time
and was working at a Verizon
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 person-
ally that this is the second one
I’ve been so close to, I guess,”
Campbell said.
Campbell on Aug. 28 had
been filling an Instacart order
at Safeway, where he said he
usually shops. He’d parked in a
different spot than usual — far-
ther 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 first few shots
ring out from behind him, in-
side the store.
“That’s when I heard what I
thought was fireworks,” Camp-
bell said. “I started thinking to
myself, ‘No way, that can’t be
fireworks from inside the store.’”
By the time he got to his
car, Campbell heard a “barrage
of shots.”
“Then people started spill-
ing out of both entrances there,”
Campbell remembered.
He stayed at the edge of the
parking lot as people continued
rushing from the store and as the
scene lit up with the lights from
dozens of emergency vehicles.
Campbell said the shoot-
ing in Las Vegas five years ago
heightened his awareness in
public places.
“From that first instance in
Vegas, it’s not paranoia, but it’s
being super aware of all the ex-
its, all the entryways, how to get
away if something were to hap-
pen,” Campbell said.
The Safeway 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, speak-
ing to a Bulletin reporter on the
phone after having just finished
a shopping trip at Target with
his 4-year-old son Monday. “I
just feel like I’m looking over
my shoulder a lot more today,
and it’s definitely directly
related to yesterday.”