Mall victim held fire at ‘kid’
Brendan “Dan” McKown said Monday that he briefly drew his gun on Tacoma Mall shooting suspect Dominick S. Maldonado, but he’s not sure Maldonado saw it.
He could have shot Maldonado, McKown said, but hesitated.
From his bed in Tacoma General Hospital, McKown told The News Tribune what he saw and did during the Nov. 20 mall shootings.
McKown, 38, said he carried a gun and even trained for situations where he could keep innocent people from getting hurt.
But the situation in the mall was just too surreal to fully comprehend, he said: A young man wearing a baseball cap turned backward strolling through the mall in white tennis shoes.
It looked like he could just as easily have been carrying a guitar, McKown said, instead of a semi-automatic rifle.
“I’m looking at this guy,” McKown said. “He’s a kid. I would have had to shoot him in the head.”
McKown just wasn’t ready for that. It’s not easy to shoot someone in the head, McKown said. McKown also didn’t want to get in the way of the police if they were handling the situation, and he knew he could get in trouble for brandishing a weapon in the mall.
McKown was struck by as many as five bullets, leaving his left leg paralyzed. He has about 10 percent movement in his right leg, said hospital spokesman Todd Kelley. Five other people wounded that day were treated and released from area hospitals.
During an interview Monday, McKown, a standup comic, was in good spirits. He had people gathered around his bed laughing on several occasions.
There was no self-pity or thirst for vengeance in his comments.
He choked up briefly several times in gratitude for the outpouring of love and support from friends, family, and community. He said it’s beyond his words to express his thanks for the fundraisers and other shows of support.
As for Maldonado, McKown said he hopes whatever prompted his actions will be addressed so that he can become a productive member of society, and that he would be willing to help.
McKown said he was on his way from the Excalibur cutlery store in the mall, where he is an assistant manager, to make a deposit at the other end of the mall.
He dropped into the Kits camera shop to say hello to a friend. He briefly stepped out of the store but circled back in because he wanted to greet someone else. He was walking to the front of the store to leave when “all hell broke loose.”
“I heard extremely powerful rifle shots. Boom! Boom! Boom! Very loud. People were diving for cover, running, screaming,” he said.
McKown knows guns, and knew what he heard was a high-caliber, military-style weapon. He even thought two people could be firing.
He walked to the front of the store to see what was going on, and took a defensive posture, crouched to one side in the store’s entrance. He had his gun out, but tucked it back into his belt, under his clothes, after thinking better of it.
Meanwhile, Maldonado walked past the Kits store.
“We had eye-to-eye contact the whole time,” McKown said. He is unsure if Maldonado saw his weapon.
McKown, standing, said to Maldonado, “I think you need to put that gun down, young man.”
McKown’s hand was back near his gun. Maldonado swung his barrel over and opened fired from the hip.
“Every one of his shots got some part of me,” McKown said.
McKown’s legs locked up with the impact of the first rounds and he started to topple over. McKown said Maldonado followed his body as he fell, firing.
The shooter was “expressionless, that was the strange thing. He was definitely cold,” McKown said.
As he felt the bullets enter his body, “I felt like an idiot,” McKown said. “I carried a gun to protect my fellow man,” but it hadn’t worked out that way.
After the firing ended, McKown said his first response was to crawl after Maldonado “so he didn’t get anyone else because I missed him,” but his friends at Kits stopped him.
McKown believes he was shot as he stood just inside the Kits entrance. He also thinks he was shot five times.
The whole encounter took only seconds, McKown said.
McKown lay on the floor for an hour while police negotiated with the suspect, who was holding several people hostage in a nearby store. He thought he was going to bleed to death.
The wounds felt like someone plunged a “flaming, molten fist” into McKown’s guts.
And he didn’t know if the gunman would be back.
Three people tended to him. His two Kits friends and another friend, a man who had come to the mall to see him and to make a purchase at Excalibur.
Roger McKown, Dan’s father, said the man had helped shield two children from Maldonado as he passed, and then rushed across the corridor into the store to help his son.
The McKown family identified the man as an Iraq war veteran. He told the Kits workers how to deal with McKown’s wounds.
Among other things, they used a teddy bear as a sponge to help stanch the flow of blood.
The veteran told Dan McKown that he had seen people hurt worse in the service, and that he was going to make it.
The veteran could not be reached for comment and his identity could not be confirmed Monday night.
Twenty, 30, 40 minutes passed, and McKown didn’t think he was going to make it. One of his Kits friends kept shouting at him not to fall asleep.
“I’m going to bleed to death here,” McKown remembers thinking. “I knew I was dying.”
After an hour, the Kits workers began to fold down the legs of a table to make a stretcher to carry McKown out of the mall, regardless of the risk.
But then the police arrived.
“I felt safe then,” McKown said.
Police took him to an ambulance.
Dan and his family said they heard from police that even before Maldonado met McKown, a person had already pulled a gun on Maldonado outside of the J.C. Penney store, but didn’t fire out of fear of hitting passers-by.
Roger McKown said Maldonado came to the mall with hundreds of rounds of ammo, aiming to take out as many people as possible, but the resistance he met changed his plans.
Tacoma police spokesman Mark Fulghum said investigators interviewed at least two people who were in the mall during the shooting who were carrying handguns. He didn’t know if either of them pointed a gun at Maldonado, he said.
“I’m not going to dispute it, he was there,” Fulghum said of Roger McKown’s account of another person with a gun. “I just can’t say for sure.”
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