Photographer talks about close encounter with Dallas gunman
DALLAS — Veteran Dallas Morning News photojournalist Tom Fox said he thought he “was gone” when he hid in an alcove from a heavily armed masked man at the downtown federal courts building Monday morning.
“I just kept thinking, ‘He’s going to look at me around that corner and he’s going to shoot,’” Fox said.
Seconds earlier, Fox had heard what sounded like gunshots. He saw a figure emerge down the block, but he couldn’t make out details.
“So I pulled up my long lens and saw someone who I realized was the shooter. And I think, ‘Oh my God.’ I squeezed off a few frames as he picked something up — a clip, I think — and then I turned and ran.”
Fox was at the Earle Cabell Federal Building for a routine assignment: get a photo of a defendant in a charter school fraud case.
Once he got the shots, he planned to head to the Winspear Opera House to cover the mayoral and City Council inauguration.
For about an hour, Fox had no luck. He passed the time watching people come and go while a homeless man danced at the corner of Griffin and Jackson streets.
He figured directing a wrong-way driver on Jackson Street to do a U-turn would be the most exciting moment of the morning. Then, minutes later, “I heard a bang-bangbang car-backfiring noise and I thought, ‘Could it be? Is this a shooting’?”
Fox immediately crouched with a wide-angle lens on the sidewalk near the courthouse’s Jackson entrance and began photographing as a man in a suit and a security guard ran past him. Bullets ricocheted off the wall above Fox.
Through his camera, he saw the gunman and took the photos. Then he tried to flee.
Fearing he would be shot in the back, Fox jumped behind a column in the building’s facade. He said he “made myself as small as possible.”
“I just stood there and prayed that he wouldn’t walk past me,” Fox said. “Because if he walks past me and sees me, he’s going to shoot me. He’s already got the gun out.
“I was just praying, ‘please don’t pass me, please don’t pass me.’”
Instead, the gunman began to fire into one of the building’s glass doorways in the direction of the metal detectors and security guards inside.
The gunman then fired toward what Fox assumed were law enforcement mobilizing at the end of the building. Two of those bullets struck the wall just feet from Fox.
“I saw the puff of smoke, but I didn’t know at the time whether that was him or the police firing,” he said.
“I’ll never forget the sound of those repeated firing and all that glass shattering. It seemed like forever before I heard return gunfire.”