I was working.  I don’t remember what day it was, but it was kind of a busy day, in the afternoon.  I was working at the lifeguard headquarters in Long Beach on the beach at the foot of Cherry Street.  We had some people that ran down to lifeguard headquarters.  There’s a big parking lot on the side of it.  They had run down the parking lot, on the side of it and said that there was somebody that had gotten shot in our parking lot.

            What was going through my mind was a little anxiety.  There was this rush to go see if we could go help that person.  We asked if the person who had shot the other person was still there and they said yes.  So to protect ourselves, because we are not armed, we went in the truck but we drove down the backside of the parking lot.

            This person was in a van parked in the parking lot right next to the beach.  There’s a wall there and a sidewalk.  So we pulled up on the back side of the parking lot which was maybe one hundred feet away.  We were maybe four rows of cars back.  It was close, very close.  They said it was a yellow van.  We parked behind a yellow van.  We were watching to see what was happening.

            I saw the guy get out of the driver’s side of the van with a gun in his hand and walked around the back side of the van to the passenger side. He opened the door and pulled a woman out the passenger side van door onto the ground.  They were parked right next to a tree by a curb so that she went part way onto the curb and part way onto the street. Actually I think part of her torso was under the front wheel of the van. 

            We were sitting there watching and I was talking to the police on the radio saying that we had a shooting suspect and the victim and tried to give a description of the van and the license plate. 

            My thought was instinctually to intervene, but I knew that professionally I had to stay back because things could turn on us.  I had purposely parked our truck with the engine towards the van so that, if we needed to, we could hide behind the dash if he was going to shoot us or something.  So we waited.

            As he came back around the van, still with the gun in his hand, he got in the van and started to back up.  Well, he back up and ran over the woman as he was backing up.  We could see her get run over.  He backed up and then drove away. 

            We found out later that the police were able to find him because of the description that I gave them.  So after he left and we could see him go down the parking lot away, we went in behind to try and take care of the lady.  She was shot in several places.

            Everything was ticking kind of slowly for me.  From the very moment we got there I felt some exhilaration or anxiety.  My adrenaline hits when I have that kind of a call and I’m on my way and I get there.  But I don’t think about what’s happening inside of me.  My thought was just focusing on the victim. 

            So we pulled up and tried to shield her a little bit with our truck.  We got her off the curb and onto the flat pavement so that we could start working on her.  There was blood everywhere.  We began to go through our abc’s, our airway, breathing, circulation, we started doing CPR and opened an airway for her.  As far as I could tell she never started breathing, but we were breathing for her with our resuscitator and doing CPR.

            Our rankings were Lifeguard Chief, lieutenant (captain), sergeant (beach supervisor), and tower lifeguard.  At that time our lieutenant showed up (I was a sergeant then) and he was trying to help us out by handing us equipment and whatever we needed.  Then the paramedics came.  He was trying to assist us with what we were doing.  Really, there wasn’t much he could do other than set up the resuscitator and things since we were working on her.  When the paramedics came he talked to them and told them what we were doing.  Then we helped the paramedics with their advanced life support, intubation and started an IV and basically that was kind of all they were able to do.  We put her in the paramedic ambulance and took her to the hospital.  So I went with them, doing CPR the whole time.  She ended up dying. 

            She had seven gun shot wounds, all the way down her body.  It was like he emptied the whole gun.

            That whole thing is very traumatic for anybody to go through.  But later I learned that it was my sister-in-law’s housekeeper.  She had been to my sister-in-law’s house cleaning her house and then he came to pick her up and drove her down into the parking lot and was mad at her for some reason and what I told you happened.  It was almost a kind of extended family thing.  That was a little traumatic..brutal.