Minneapolis shooting: Witnesses describe harrowing scenes at hospital and school

MINNEAPOLIS – Ms Ellie Mertens, a youth minister at Annunciation Catholic Church, which is also home to an elementary school in Minneapolis, said she was sitting with children in the pews when bullets propelled through the windows.

“I was just feet away from this window,” Ms Mertens, 25, said in an interview. “The pew saved my life.”

She said the shooting lasted about two minutes, and the school principal instructed everyone to get down.

“There was a hole and the bullets came in, ricocheting off of stuff,” she said. “Kids were shot. It was horrifying.”

Ms Patty Brown, 64, of McCook, Nebraska, said her daughter Kristi Forte was dropping off her five-year-old son at a programme at Annunciation Catholic School

when the shooting occurred.

“My daughter was pretty upset,” she said, detailing how Ms Forte told her that the gym “was full of crying parents and teachers”.

Ms Brown said her daughter told her that she saw dozens of ambulances before she was directed to leave.

“She goes, ‘Mom, I’m just sick for these other people’,” Ms Brown said. “She said she had her child, but others didn’t.”

Inside the Hennepin County Medical Centre emergency room, where multiple victims were taken, Ms Za’khia Jones, 29, was with her fiancee when she saw children who appeared to be bloody being rushed in.

“One kid came in and they had rushed her into a room and she was just screaming she didn’t want to die,” Ms Jones said during an interview on Aug 27. “It was chaos back there in the ER.”

Ms Jones said hospital staff were moving patients out of rooms and into hallways to make room for the victims of the shooting, describing their arrival as “back to back”.

“My heart was so heavy,” she said. “It was just a very sad situation.” NYTIMES