Arkansans recall calm in store as bullets flew
LITTLE FLOCK — David and Beverly Engle were in the water aisle when they heard a gunshot Saturday in the Walmart Supercenter in El Paso, Texas.
Then they heard more shots.
The Little Flock couple had stopped at the Walmart for vitamin water before heading back to Arkansas. They had spent a week at a center on the Mexican border helping migrants released from custody after trying to enter the U.S.
When the shooting began, the Engles said, people started walking toward them. Beverly
Engle said she recalls the fear on their faces.
“I remember thinking how calm it is,” she said. “There was no mob of panicked people trying to leave the store.”
People said there was “a white guy with an AK-47,” David Engle said.
“People were moving to get out. It wasn’t a cattle stampede,” he said.
El Paso’s police chief, Greg Allen, said investigators believe the suspected gunman, 21-year-old Patrick Crusius, posted an anti-immigrant screed that appeared online shortly before the attack.
Crusius is being held on capital-murder charges, though federal prosecutors are also considering charging him with hate crimes.
The Engles are executive
directors of Restoration Village, a nonprofit that helps women and children leave abusive homes.
The couple praised the Walmart employees for keeping people calm, opening a back door and ushering customers to a nearby Sam’s Club.
Reality hit him, David Engle said, when he saw a man carrying a baby in a bloody blanket. The man was running toward an ambulance, he said.
Two wounded women — one shot in the leg and the other in the arm — made their way to the Sam’s Club store, Beverly Engle said.
The Engles said they never saw the gunman in the store. The shooter killed 22 people and injured dozens.
The evacuees spent three hours in the Sam’s Club before police would let them leave, David Engle said.
The Engles went to a nearby building where Salvation Army volunteers were handing out water to law enforcement personnel. Recognizing some of the volunteers as people who had also volunteered at the migrant center, the Engles began passing out water.
Their son got them a hotel room and a friend arranged a flight home for them Monday because their car, parked in the store lot, is now part of the crime scene. They can return to El Paso next week to get it.
On their way into the store before Saturday’s shooting, the Engles said they saw a soccer coach and some children raising money outside the building.
David Engle said it reminded him of their grandchildren who play soccer, so they stopped to talk with the coach. He said they planned to give a donation when they left the store.
He learned later that the coach was killed in the shooting.
“There’s just no sense to it.” David Engle said he and his wife have to cope with the memories of what they saw, but he really feels for law enforcement officials and others who saw more of the carnage.
“If I was an artist, I could draw a picture of the coach and others,” he said. “They are still in my mind.”