Inside the attack on the Chattanooga Recruiting station

 by MOTHAX

  

This is kind of an amazing story, and fairly long, so I can only use a few paragraphs under Fair Use, but you should GO READ THE WHOLE THING.

When the Chattanooga recruiting center came under attack this summer, the first of two targets in a Tennessee man's murderous and still unexplained rampage, a Marine inside shielded his young daughter from the gunfire and potentially saved a colleague's life by ordering him not to run, Marine Corps Times has learned.

Gunnery Sgt. Camden Meyer's actions on July 16 are among several revelations gleaned from a Marine Corps investigation into what transpired when Muhammad Youssef Abdulazeez opened fire on the Chattanooga recruiting center before killing five service members at a Navy facility across town. The investigating officer's report, released by Marine Corps Recruiting Command via the Freedom of Information Act, also discloses that two potential recruits — Marines call them poolees — were among the gunman's first targets, and that Meyer, the recruiting station's noncommissioned officer in charge, subsequently discounted the adequacy of the training Marines receive for lone-wolf active-shooter scenarios....

One Marine was wounded in the recruiting center attack, but all seven people inside — the four Marines, two poolees and one little girl, according to a Marine official — escaped without serious injury. No one was armed, the report states.

Abdulazeez, 24, had an assault rifle, a shotgun and a pistol. From a rented Ford Mustang convertible, he fired between 30 and 45 rounds at the recruiting center's glass storefront before speeding off.

Lance Cpl. Christopher Gilliam, the most junior Marine in the office, was first to spot the shooter and yelled to the others to run. Meyer was seated in his office when a bullet came through the wall and hit the ceiling. When he stood up and saw Abdulazeez, Meyer told the investigating officer, he immediately “grabbed my daughter and yelled at the same time for [Sgt. Winfield] Thompson to ‘get down.’ ” Thompson, who was in Meyer's office when the attack began, was ready to run, Meyer's statement reads. Doing so could have made him an easy target.

Abdulazeez began to fire quickly, Meyer told the investigator. “I hit the floor," he said, "and immediately began to flatten my daughter’s body as flat as it could go and shielding it with my body from the fire. I yelled at [Thompson] to stay down until the break in fire. …I know the shooter would have to switch weapons, change clips or reload."

An amazing story of heroism, go read the whole thing.

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