Dragging victim to safety in a Carl’s Jr.
On what had been a quiet, otherwise ho-hum afternoon in San Bruno, a fast-food worker and a man just stopping for a burger found themselves suddenly grasping for makeshift tourniquets and dragging a gunshot victim to safety.
Usually, the loudest sound around Cherry Avenue is a car backfiring.
“It’s scary enough at school, but near where you work?” said high school junior Robbie Caoile, who was working one building away from YouTube’s headquarters when gunfire there sent him scrambling for cover on Tuesday. “Where does it stop?”
According to police, a woman stormed onto the YouTube campus before 1 p.m., shooting and wounding three people before killing herself.
Law enforcement sources identified the shooter as Nasim Nafaji Aghdam, 39, of Menifee (Riverside County), a disgruntled video maker who had complained online about being censored by YouTube.
Jesse Pineda and his girlfriend, Leslie Paladini, had stopped for lunch at the nearby Carl’s Jr. when the shooting began. Suddenly, Pineda found himself racing outside to drag a bleeding young woman who had been shot in the left leg to safety across the street.
Travis Ganley and restaurant employee Michael Finney, 21, leaped in to help. The three men lay the shooting victim on a booth bench and got to work to stop the bleeding — with wadded-up napkins, then a shirt.
“She was pretty calm,” Finney said of the unidentified woman. He said he tied a bungee cord around her leg, and asked the woman why she was shot. She responded that she didn’t know.
Paladini stayed in the car, horrified, as gun smoke rose from YouTube’s soaring, glasswalled complex.
“I freaked out,” Paladini said. “I didn’t know what it was, or where it was coming from — there were just a lot of shots.”
Pineda, meanwhile, went back toward the YouTube building to try and help more victims. He said there appeared to have been a catered courtyard party going on when the shooter walked in.
“The chef was freaking out and pointed to a girl in the courtyard, saying, ‘She’s dead, she’s dead!’ ” Pineda recounted. The woman on the ground was apparently the shooter.
Some residents of the San Bruno neighborhood raced to the scene, as police and emergency vehicles swarmed in and as YouTube employees fled their offices in a panic.
“It’s so sad to see the stuff happening, people getting killed right here,” said Nancy Gonis, who has lived in San Bruno since 1972 and ran over when she heard the sirens blaring.
“Just think about what’s happened recently — from a school, with those children getting shot, to that vet in Yountville, and now to this. It’s a very scary world we’re living in.”
She was referring to the killing of 17 people at a Florida high school on Feb. 14, and the March 9 murder-suicide that took the lives of three health care workers at a treatment center for veterans in Yountville.
At the Jamba Juice two doors down from Carl’s Jr., manager Thomas Matela greeted police as they filtered away from the crime scene, shaking their hands and letting them use his restroom.
“I heard, like, 12 gunshots — bam-bam-bam — and closed my door right away,“Matela said. “Not even five minutes went by and all the cops I could imagine showed up. They came fast, and I’m glad they did. There are too many crazy people in this world.”
Matela closed early, and a couple of his employees hung by the door afterward to quietly talk about what they had seen — officers with assault rifles rushing to the scene, fire engines screaming up to the curb, frightened employees running from the sounds of gunshots.
Two of the employees working in the area, Robbie Caoile and Rocio Navarro, were juniors at a nearby high school, and they had just participated in an anti-gun march at their school last month in the aftermath of the Florida massacre.
This eruption of violence mere steps away from where they work shook the pair.
“It all happens in the blink of an eye,“Rocio said. “You wake up every day questioning, ‘Is my school safe?’ And now this? This?”