Survivors of the Colorado supermarket shooting recalled in harrowing detail how they could “feel” bullets whizzing past them as they fled — as the bloodthirsty gunman closed in on them.
Sarah Moonshadow and her son Nicholas were checking out when shots broke out Monday afternoon inside the King Soopers in Boulder.
“The first one shocked me and the second one I knew for sure it was a shot,” Moonshadow breathlessly recalled to Reuters. “I said, ‘Nicholas get down,’ and Nicholas ducked. And we just started listening.
She said there was a series of “repetitive shots.”
“And then there was a brief pause and I just said, ‘Nicholas, run!’ and he said, ‘No, don’t move.’ I said, ‘Run right now! We have three seconds,'” the mom recalled.
“He started running and then he shot towards us — we could feel it. And we just kept going, just ran.”
The 2:30 p.m. slaughter left 10 people dead, including Boulder police officer Eric Talley and, according to witness Logan Smith, two Starbucks employees.
Smith, who’s worked at the Starbucks inside the grocery store for a year, recalled scrambling to hide himself and his coworker behind the kiosk.
“I ran to my coworker, put her into a corner, put some trash cans to cover her, protect her,” he said Tuesday on NBC’s “Today” show. “I was definitely in a life-threatening situation if the shooter came into the kiosk.”
Noting other recent shootings in Colorado, Smith added, “It’s been in my head that something like this could happen.”
Newlyweds Neven and Quinlyn Sloan were doing their usual grocery shop when they heard gunshots ring out at 2:30 p.m.
“The first thing I heard was the bang,” Quinlyn recalled on “Today,” adding that she and her husband were separated in the store. “I didn’t react right away, it was pretty muffled too because it was outside. And then it got louder — and it was a bunch of bangs in a row.”
She and Neven reunited and rushed outside — but the hubby went back in to help a man named Michael and two older women.
“I felt god compel me to go back,” Neven said. “I just wanted to go back and help them and help Michael get those two ladies out.”
Quinlyn was hardly surprised by Neven’s act of heroism.
“Everyone in the crowd is running away and my husband of a month and a half is running towards it,” she said. “That’s totally his heart and he just loves people in that way.”
King Sooper shopper Ryan Borowski said customers helped each other rush to the back of the store, where employees then led them through an exit door.
But others were paralyzed in sheer terror, he recalled.
“We ran and I don’t know why other people didn’t and I am sorry that they froze and I just wish that this didn’t happen – I wish I had an answer for why it did,” Borowski told CNN.
He said he was floored a deadly situation like this could happen in Boulder.
“This feels like the safest spot in America and I just nearly got killed for getting a soda, you know, and a bag of chips,” he said. “Doesn’t feel good.”
