Wikipedia entry of the Washington Navy Yard shooting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_Navy_Yard_shooting
It started out as a normal Monday morning. I had just started at this new job in the Washington Navy Yard in Washington DC about a month prior and I was getting settled into the new environment.
I had been commuting from my home about an hour and a half away each day and trying to keep my hopes up that my supervisors would see what good of a job I’d been doing with my “hit the ground running” attitude that they’d let me work from home a couple days a week. It was a bit difficult since it was a relatively small group of people and they traveled a lot so I still was learning The Who’s who in the office but things were looking good.
I was prepping myself for our Monday morning staff meeting and I saw a janitor with his large trash can going through the hallways while I walked back to my cubicle with my first cup of coffee. I sat down at my computer and heard “POP..POP POP” like a firecracker but more metal sounding. I initially thought the janitor had dropped a trash can on the floor but then heard someone yelling from the main hallway “SHOTS FIRED!”
My cubicle neighbor next to me popped up over the cube wall and looked right at me yelling “SHOTS FIRED! SHOTS FIRED!” Like I was supposed to know what the hell that meant. We stared at each other for what realistically was a couple seconds but felt like a few minutes. During that time I thought to myself “is this some type of drill? Did I not get an email about this or something? Am I supposed to hide under my desk? Nobody told me what to do..”
Then in the rest of the office, I heard screams and yelling and saw a bunch of my office mates moving away from the doorway leading to the main hallway where the shots came from. I got up and followed and we all huddled into our Captain’s office since it was the biggest one, we could lock the door, and he was gone for the day.
We must have been there for a few minutes and someone said that we should probably try to evacuate since we were on the ground floor and had a fire door we could leave from. I ran back to my desk to grab my uniform hat (called a cover…because what good Navy officer goes outside without his/her cover on his/her head?) and ran out with the rest of the group.
We were outside and huddled together across the street on the sidewalk next to the parking garage where I was parked…damn! My keys were still at my desk, no chance of driving home until this is all over..
There were streams of other people from other offices coming out of the building too and I was relatively calm at this point. The building we worked in had armed security guards and surely this must have been a disgruntled worker. It sounded like a hand gun and they must have subdued the shooter easily enough.
So now we were all just waiting outside for a few minutes and we saw more security guards running toward the building. Then more security guards with bullet proof vests and machine guns… and then one of them yelled at us “GET AWAY FROM THIS BUILDING!!” And I could see the fear in his eyes..
Holy shit..now this is getting serious is what I thought to myself. This is something that won’t be over in the next couple of hours.
Luckily I had my cell phone and I knew my wife, Chantel, was home. I called her as we began swiftly walking away down the side street toward the nearby food court..
“Hi honey, you might want to turn on the news but there’s a shooter in my building and I’m ok…I’m going to turn my phone off to conserve the battery and I’ll let you know what is happening as soon as I can.”
She was shocked but knew that I needed to get moving and we said we love you to each other and hung up. Later on that evening she said that she’d never heard me have fear in my voice like I did then…