There is a good article out today on what happened that day. I'm going to post some excerpts and photos from the article for the purpose of having an ON TOPIC discussion of this event and what we can learn from it. There will be no thread drift into politics.
https://www.buzzfeed.com/katenocera/baseball-shooting?utm_term=.yo7YMwBmB2#.tx0Ozl838K
The article goes on to talk about the first aid and other things that happened in the aftermath.
Here are some of the photos:
This is the ball diamond after the shooting.
The positions of the shooter and the officers.
positions of the backup officers
And the dugout.
While they were targeted for political reasons, it's not out of the realm of possibility that anyone here could be in a similar position if an EDP lets loose on a ball game.
I don't know how many public ball diamonds have actual dugouts, I can only think of one around here.
Again, if this discussion turns political the thread is done. We are in ST&T here, lets keep all comments on topic.
https://www.buzzfeed.com/katenocera/baseball-shooting?utm_term=.yo7YMwBmB2#.tx0Ozl838K
The Republican team had been practicing for years at this field, a regulation-size diamond with batting cages, in a suburban area. “People go through, they walk their dog, they bring their kids.” The Republicans get out there at 6 a.m., run a baseball practice, then head back into the District, shower, shave, and go to work on Capitol Hill. “It’s the most benign, very quiet, sedate place.” They’d never even had a protester.
Fleischmann would’ve been long gone — practice was basically over — except he wanted to plead his case.
So he walked up behind home plate, OK, to see Larry Hardy, who is and was the pitching coach and played for the San Diego Padres. Larry, look, I’m hot. And Hardy told him it wasn’t his decision to make. I understand that, but I’m pissed off because I come out and I practice hard every day and I know what’s gonna happen — the game will start and I’ll be begging from the first inning on to get in, and they’ll put me in for a half inning at the end and I won’t get an at-bat. And Hardy’s telling him, no, no, it won’t be that way—
“We hear from over in this area just a loud, single bang. Just one.”
The sound startled Will Batson, a Senate staffer and former NFL punter who was throwing batting practice, enough that he almost hit Rep. Rodney Davis.
There was a pause. Only a few seconds, but long enough to experience what Rep. Steve Pearce would describe as a “strange, dissociated notion that I can’t imagine that loud of a metallic sound.” A filing cabinet falling off a moving truck, a firecracker, some nearby construction, a car backfiring, maybe?
“It doesn’t stop,” Fleischmann says. “This guy just keeps cranking out, firing and firing and firing. People are screaming.”
“People, staff, and players,” says Rep. Joe Barton, “were just like quail, were scattering.”
When the shooting started, Matt Mika started running toward the Capitol Police, who were parked about 20 feet from the first-base entrance. He ran for the open gate, just behind the first-base dugout, trying to get out, trying to get to the police, hoping to be helpful.
Mika is a handsome guy, and young, at least compared to the team’s players. He’s a lobbyist who volunteers with the team, the kind of well-liked guy who knows everyone in Washington.
“Three or four of us were kind of huddling right there trying to get out the gate at the same time,” Batson says. “I saw Matt, saw him kind of hesitate a little bit.”
This is where Mika got hit. The bullet punctured his right lung, which collapsed, and went out his chest. He had three broken ribs, a cracked rib, a floating rib. The bullet hit his sternum. Missed his heart by less than half an inch. “7.62 is the bullet, that’s like an inch and a half — so that went through my chest.”
But Mika continued to run.
“We got outside the gate...turned around,” says Ryan Thompson, another staffer, “and Matt’s like, ‘Dude, I’ve been shot.’”
They told him to get down, to lie down behind the Capitol Police’s SUV. So he did. He lay down on the pavement. Special Agent Crystal Griner tried to protect him. She was engaging the shooter. She got shot in the ankle. He got shot again, too, in the arm.
It was hot inside his chest. His Detroit Tigers jersey was open, with blood all the way down. “I have a hole in my chest. Everyone can see my heart.”
Mika never felt either bullet. He stayed on the ground, just trying to breathe. “Time slowed down.”
Steve Scalise knew he was shot instantly. He felt something as he was trying to turn away from the shooter. “My legs gave out, and I fell down.”
He knew he had to keep moving or risk another bullet. “You didn’t know how long it was going to last, or what was going to happen next, or, you know, if you were going to get hit again.”
And so one of the most important politicians in America started crawling, using his arms to pull himself toward the outfield from second base. He started praying. He started moving less and less.
After he’d reached shallow grass in right field, his arms gave out.
It felt like forever. People who had made it off the field were calling out to him.
But he stayed out there, alone, because no one could reach him.
Zack Barth could see the shooter from center field. “Not everybody could.”
He saw him — right next to the third-base dugout — and he saw him keep shooting. Pop, pop, pop, pop, pop. Barth started to run. He wanted to put as much distance between himself and the shooter, to get as far away as he could. He ran into right field, right behind one of his friends. The outfield fence is tall, something like 20 feet, but there’s a big gate, so Barth — a quiet 25-year-old staffer for Williams — went for it.
The gate was locked. He’d run into a corner. “There’s nowhere I could go.” The gate was locked and Barth was trapped inside the field.
“So I just kind of hit the deck.” He and his friend dropped to the ground, lying on the warning track with nothing between them and an SKS-style semiautomatic. He saw the shooter turn their way. “Then you start hearing, like, things popping around you.” Gravel was going everywhere.
There wasn’t pain, or at least not pain he was thinking about. But his leg was hot. Really hot. “I could feel how hot it was and I definitely knew, like, I had gotten shot.”
His friend climbed up the fence, way up in the air, then jumped down. Barth tried to follow him up, but quickly realized he wouldn’t be able to do that. A bullet had gone straight through his leg.
So he did the only thing he could: run. He turned and ran toward the first-base dugout, maybe 60 feet, from outfield to infield, past Scalise, whom he could not help, back closer toward the shooter.
“I jumped into the dugout. Roger happened to be right there. And so I just kind of — I mean, the way he describes it — jumped into his arms.”
He dove into my arms; it’s like God brought us together,” Williams says.
When the shooting started, Williams knew he needed to get inside the first-base dugout. Unusually, the field’s dugouts are real — you step down into them, like on a pro baseball field. “Real dugouts. And I remember, so my brain said, I gotta get to that dugout. So I dove into that dugout and I literally was like diving into a swimming pool with no water.”
This is where a bunch of them hid, everybody from Sen. Jeff Flake, the Trump critic, to Rep. Mo Brooks, the Freedom Caucus member from Alabama, feet below the field.
“All we could hear was this guy firing this ... weapon,” Williams says.
Surrounded by cinderblock and lying on concrete, every noise was in stereo. “It just kind of echoes around in there,” says Flake. “That was pretty horrifying to hear all that.”
And ricochet bullets were landing there, too. It occurred to a few of them then that maybe the dugout wasn’t really that safe after all. And if you go to the field, you can see bullet holes through the top of the dugout, sheds, and metal poles on the fence.
“It would be pretty easy for him to just start shooting in there and hitting people — ’cause you couldn’t miss, we were so tightly packed together,” Brooks says.
They kept waiting for the Capitol Police to fire back. (At least one person worried that maybe the agents had been killed, and then...?) They kept waiting for it to end, hoping that they could get out to Scalise, who some could see trying to drag himself into the outfield. They just kept waiting, for what felt like forever, for any noise that wasn’t the shooter. “If we could hear sirens, we would know somebody’s coming to help us,” Williams says.
And then came the shots from the Capitol Police.
The difference in the shots was audible: boom boom boom versus ping ping ping. “As opposed to that rapid fire of a strong semiautomatic-weapon ba-bam ba-bam ba-bam that just kept coming and kept going,” Fleischmann says, “we heard pow pow pow pow.”
Still, even as all this was going on, “everybody was doing something,” Williams says. “I had somebody tell me, ‘Well, I bet you were freaking out.’ Nobody freaked out.”
The article goes on to talk about the first aid and other things that happened in the aftermath.
Here are some of the photos:
This is the ball diamond after the shooting.
The positions of the shooter and the officers.
positions of the backup officers
And the dugout.
While they were targeted for political reasons, it's not out of the realm of possibility that anyone here could be in a similar position if an EDP lets loose on a ball game.
I don't know how many public ball diamonds have actual dugouts, I can only think of one around here.
Again, if this discussion turns political the thread is done. We are in ST&T here, lets keep all comments on topic.
