Bobby Shapiro ran down Central Avenue in his socks, moving toward the street corner where gunfire had erupted moments before. At first, he just wanted to confirm that what he was hearing was real: a mass shooting at a Fourth of July parade in Highland Park.
Any sense of disbelief vanished at the sight of bone fragments, blood, and chunks of meat littering the street where a parade had been marching minutes before. Then she saw the bodies.
“It was pure terror. It was a battle zone,” Shapiro, 52, said in an interview. When the first shots rang out, he was taking off his cycling shoes about 100 meters away.
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Emergency vehicles and first responders weren’t on the scene yet, so Shapiro, a technology salesman with no medical training, began doing what he could to help.
From bystanders who tied tourniquets and administered CPR to parade goers who fled and rescued and cared for a two-year-old orphan covered in blood, people from all corners of the Highland Park community sprang into action on March 4. July in the wake of an unspeakable tragedy. .
Nearly a dozen people, including off-duty doctors, nurses and a football coach, were among the first to provide vital assistance to victims of the parade shooting.
“Things happen so fast that your brain can’t wrap your head around that there’s an active shooter in your town, in your quiet little neighborhood,” said Dr. Wendy Rush, an anesthesiologist with decades of experience working in trauma centers.
Rush teamed up with Shapiro to try to save an elderly man who had a gunshot wound to his thigh and another that had left a hole in his abdomen.
As Rush wore a ventilation mask and bag to help the elderly man breathe, Shapiro and another bystander took turns applying chest compressions and putting pressure on his wounds.
Meanwhile, “we didn’t know where the shooter was. We knew he wasn’t dead,” Rush said.
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Nearly 30 minutes later, Rush boarded an ambulance alongside the dying man, and Shapiro, wearing bloodstained shorts, returned to the bench where he had been changing his shoes hours ago.
The man died in hospital and was later identified as Stephen Straus, an 88-year-old financial advisor.
Rush’s husband and son were also at the scene. As members of the Highland Park Community Emergency Response Team, both men have training in first aid and basic life support. They were working the parade hoping to help with regular crowd control and the occasional lost child.
Rush’s son treated people with less critical gunshot wounds, applying tourniquets and pressure to stop the bleeding. Her husband, Rush said, spent most of his time caring for Keely Roberts, a school superintendent who was shot twice in the foot and leg.
Roberts’ 8-year-old son Cooper was shot in the chest and remains in serious condition at University of Chicago Comer Children’s Hospital with his spine amputated.
His twin brother, Luke, was nearby.
“I will never forget his face. I was just hysterical. She kept saying, ‘Don’t let my mommy die, don’t let my mommy die. Don’t let her lips turn blue like my brother’s. It was the worst thing you could imagine,” Eddie Rush told Fox 32 Chicago.
Football coach Brad Hokin was in his usual spot at the beginning of the route when the shooting began. He broke into a run down the bloody street past those with minor injuries and toward the people he knew needed help most urgently.
When his wife, nurse practitioner Jacquie Toia, called from their seats a quarter mile away to make sure he was okay, Hokin simply told her, “Come here. We need you.”
Toia, 64, rushed to the scene still unaware of what was happening. When she saw the destruction, his instincts kicked into gear. As a nurse for 36 years, Ella Toia had experience working in an emergency setting.
By this time, the paramedics on the scene had equipment, and Toia and another nurse on the scene began administering the IVs.
Meanwhile, Hokin, with no prior medical training, was putting pressure on gunshot wounds and helping EMTs load the wounded onto stretchers until all the victims were on their way to hospitals.
“We did what we could to address immediate needs, and that’s probably the real tragedy: We didn’t have enough hands to do what needed to be done,” Toia said. Responders were overwhelmed by the sheer number of casualties.
“Thirty-six years in medicine is enough for the loss to be no stranger to me,” said Toia. “This was so different. This was hell.”
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Dr. David Baum, an OB/GYN and longtime pageant attendee, was sitting with his family when the shooting began. The doctor rushed to help and found bodies destroyed by bullets. Baum recalled trying to get people to ambulances and seeing injuries that were unlike anything he had treated before.
“These were war injuries,” Baum said.
Both Baum and Toia expressed frustration that the shooter had such easy access to high-capacity weapons. “You should never have to worry about getting killed on your street on the 4th of July in a parade,” Toia said.
Dr. Rush’s son, Shane Selig, said everyone is still processing what happened.
“There are those who feel guilty for not having done more,” he said, adding, “at least I was able to do something.”
But it’s hard, these sequels. People, she said, will be “marked forever by this.” And she makes him angry.
Images of the wounded and dying haunt those who rushed to help.
Shapiro wakes up and when he opens his eyes, “it’s the ‘bang, bang, bang, bang, bang of the shooting and the initial panic again.”
For Toia, “the faces of the children running, screaming, crying and falling will never escape me.”
Still, Hokin says he won’t be dissuaded next year from joining the community he loves.
In her 58 years, she has been to the parade 52 times. Even during the pandemic when the show was cancelled, she came out just to say that she was there.
“I’m sure next July 4th I’ll be on the corner at 8 o’clock, waiting for the parade.”
© 2022 The Canadian Press