Hero barista relives ‘longest 20 minutes’

A fast-acting Starbucks barista said Wednesday it was his job to protect his 69-year-old co-worker — by hiding her behind a pile of trash cans — as the Colorado gunman bore down on them.

Logan Smith recalled the splitsecond decision he had to make Monday afternoon after he witnessed the shooter kill someone in the parking lot of the Boulder King Soopers, then make his way into the store.

“I knew since she is my elder . . . I must protect her over myself and so, instinctively, I pushed her into a corner, covered her with trash cans and then tried to find a place for myself,” Smith said.

But at 6 feet 5, it wasn’t so easy. “My last resort was a trash can that my head was visible outside of so I wasn’t in the safest situation, ” he explained

Smith said he heard the gunman approach, standing about 13 feet away from the coffee kiosk inside the grocery store. The killer didn’t speak as he made his way through the store, Smith recalled.

“Not a single word was said from him, from what I could hear, until police arrived,” he said. “They shouted at him, gunshots were fired. It was just silence and the store music.”

He called the harrowing ordeal the “longest 20 minutes of my life.”

“We signed the paper when we got the job — the customers are first, and I’ll put my life underneath their lives,” said Smith.

“If anyone was going to die, it was me before my customers, before my co-workers.”

He added, “I don’t consider myself a hero . . . the officer [Eric Talley] that was shot at the entrance, he is the biggest hero of it all.”

Among the victims was Smith’s colleague Denny Stong, who picked up coffee from Smith the day he died.

At 20, Stong was the youngest of the victims and was training to be a pilot.

“He did nothing wrong and deserved this in no way at all. He made no choice that led to this,” his friend James Noland wrote on a GoFundMe page.