Wikipedia entry of the Washington Navy Yard shooting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_Navy_Yard_shooting
This is the second post in a 3-part series describing my experiences with the Washington Navy Yard shooting that occurred in 2013. If you missed the first post, you can find it here: http://50shadesofdave.com/2018/07/02/is-this-some-sort-of-drill/
This is NOT some sort of drill..
At this point, I’m walking down an alleyway between a parking garage and an office building. Someone had decided that we should go to the food court since it was an large enough area, had tv’s so we could follow what was being covered by the news if they were covering it, and we could eat. Made sense at the time.
While I was walking, a heavily-armored (like flak jacket wearing, helmet on) police officer ran past us as a group going the opposite way we were. He slowed down just enough to yell out “Where’s building 197?!?!” which was the building we were in and where the shots were initially fired..
A few of us pointed behind us and gave him cursory directions and he began his full sprint toward the building with his weapon ready..
This is where I thought: “Oh my god, nobody knows what the fuck is going on…”
I mean, think about it. This is a Navy base. To get on the base, you have to show appropriate identification to an armed guard (usually 1 of 3 guards at the gate), be willing to have your bag searched at random, and then for our building, we had to have an access card to swipe to get past the security turnstiles once we enter the building. And at the turnstiles, there is at least 1 other armed guard monitoring the entry of everyone. This was just a normal building…there are other buildings that have even more security protocols (have to be buzzed in by a security guard or have a separate access card to gain entry). This place was supposed to be secure!
And now there are DC cops running toward the building with no clue of the layout, no clue of what’s going on, no clue if the shooter is still alive or how many shooters there are…
At this point, I’m starting to think this might have been a terrorist attack…so I’m literally going through my head and trying to figure out if this was something coordinated, and trying to draw correlations to the date..anything.
And now is when I start freaking out. The buildings we’re near are at least 4 stories tall. The parking garage is at least 5 stories tall. I’m looking up at the roof tops to see if there are any snipers that are just waiting for us to walk into their crosshairs. This is when I became afraid for my life.
The last time I had felt this way was when my mom chased me around our condo with a butcher knife when I was a 4 year old…never was ever afraid to die in all my years of flying, landing on aircraft carriers at night, going through swim survival or prisoner of war training..never was afraid like I was at these 2 points in my life.
Now the pace significantly picked up as I scanned the rooftops for any terrorists, and we all finally got into the building that housed the foodcourt. By this time, there were a couple hundred of us in there looking up at the tv’s hanging along the walls and columns that were perpetually tuned to all the cable news channels…and NOTHING was being reported. It was the normal Monday morning news cycle so far…
The thought of a coordinated terrorist attack was still on my mind (and other folks’ thoughts too), because then I thought, “Well, if whoever is in charge of this wanted to kill as many people as possible, then it would make sense to plant a bomb wherever a bunch of people would normally congregate, like the foodcourt…”
I think a few other people had the same thought too, because we only were in the foodcourt no longer than 5 minutes before we were all told to evacuate to a more secure building. We then trekked outside, again keeping my eyes peeled and made it to one of those higher-security buildings that I mentioned before. I think I might have sent off a text or 2 to my wife before entering to let her know that I was still ok, and then we were camped in one of the larger conference rooms where someone had figured out how to tune in the overhead projector to one of the news channels where we spent the next 10 hours…it was now 9:30 or so in the morning..