After a gunman opened fire Saturday at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, Christopher Grant could have run for safety. Grant wasn’t armed, aft...
After a gunman opened fire Saturday at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, Christopher Grant could have run for safety.
Grant wasn’t armed, after all, and the gunman had an assault rifle.
Instead of fleeing, Grant did the exact opposite — he tried to get the gunman’s attention, even though it meant putting his own life in considerable danger.
Grant’s actions resulted in his being shot, though he may very well have saved lives in the process.
“I heard gunshots, and I knew what it was, so I ran towards my mother to try to shield her,” Grant told CNN’s Chris Cuomo from his hospital bed on Monday.
Grant was in the store at the time, but he said he saw the shooter in the parking lot “popping people off.”
While his mother usually carries a handgun wherever she goes, that day she didn’t, he said. She fled to the back of the store, but he decided to stay.
“I started throwing random bottles at him,” Grant said. “I’m not a baseball player, so one went this way, one went that way, and then one went right towards him.”
Soon, the gunman started firing at Grant.
“I ducked, and he just boop-boop-boop-boop started firing off rounds at me,” Grant said. “I was like, ‘Oh my God, this guy is shooting at me.’”
“When I got hit, it was like — it was like somebody put a hand grenade in your back and pulled the pin,” Grant said. “That’s basically what it felt like.”
Grant recalled how people in the store were “praying in Spanish” that their lives would be spared. But the gunman kept going.
“They were on the ground, and he still just shot them in the head,” Grant said. “He had no remorse for their lives at all.”
“One little girl saw her parents get killed right in front of her,” he added. “How much hate do you have to have in your heart to do that?”
Watch Grant’s interview below:
Despite being injured, Grant wanted to “do something,” so he got up and ran through the store to the auto department, where he encountered Customs and Border Protection agent Donna Sifford.
“There’s a shooter inside! Code Brown!” he recalled telling Sifford, referring to the military code.
“We were trying to get as many people as possible out,” Sifford told CNN.
“We didn’t know where the shooter was. We ducked down between two vehicles on the northeast side of Walmart,” she said. “Chris was fading, losing a lot of blood.”
Sifford eventually put Grant in the bed of an off-duty police officer’s pick-up truck. The officer made sure Sifford made it to an ambulance.
“I’ll forever be indebted to her because I honestly think she saved my life,” Grant said of Sifford, his “guardian angel.”
And despite his courageous actions, Grant doesn’t think he’s a hero.
“I did what any good man would have done,” he said.
No comments