By Caleb Hutton
A 911 caller said she fractured her foot earlier this week when she ducked to hide from what she believed was a man wielding a shotgun near Carl Cozier Elementary School.
The suspect turned out to be a child toting a toy gun, but as Sara Geballe explained Thursday morning, June 21, she wasn’t the only one who was fooled. She was walking with her son when they saw what appeared to be a full-grown person wearing a bandanna and carrying a long-barrel gun near a gas station on Lakeway Drive.
They ducked out of view of the suspect as soon as possible, and in the process Gebelle injured her foot. When she got it examined later, she found her foot was fractured in three places.
Police swarmed the area and found a boy carrying a toy gun and heading to a swingset at Carl Cozier. An officer radioed that the boy appeared to be “playing cowboy.”
From a distance, Gebelle said, the gunman could have been 15 or 30 years old, or even older, because “it didn’t look like a young child, that’s for sure.”
In light of recent shootings in Seattle, she added, “you never know when somebody’s going to start shooting wildly.”
Gebelle hopes the parents of the kid are more aware of how people might react to seeing someone carrying a gun — fake or not — in public.
Edited Friday evening, June 22, in response to a comment about the third-to-last paragraph.
I hope that in the future she is more observant. She could get some innocent person killed with her blatant misidentification. “The gunman looked 15 or 30 years old” is a pretty wide spread and out of the range of a reasonable identification. Sounds more like a busy body than a concerned citizen.
Dear Birch Bay Ray,
How can you be so mean spirited? When you see an adult sized person wearing a bandanna and brandishing a weapon in front of a 7/11 store it’s pretty easy to get scared. And you run. How is that being a busy body? Moreover, I never said he was “15 or 30.” That was a misquote. What I said was person brandishing the weapon was of adult height. At the distance I was from him and the fact that he was wearing a bandanna covering his face, he could have just as easily been 15 as 30 (or 40 or 50). He did not look like a “child.” My 28 year old son and I both had the same shocked reaction and we started running for our lives. I trust you would have done likewise if you had been confronted with the same threatening sight.
~ Sara Geballe
I can imagine that would have been intimidating – but –
In such a busy area this individual must have been seen by dozens if not hundreds of ppl. Curious why everyone wasn’t running and calling 911. We all see things slightly differently, but it does seem odd that there weren’t tons of people calling…..
As the officer reported:
“Police swarmed the area and found a boy carrying a toy gun and heading to a swingset at Carl Cozier. An officer radioed that the boy appeared to be “playing cowboy.”
Sara states:
” he could have just as easily been 15 as 30 (or 40 or 50).”
Safe to say a adult sized child or person between the ages of 15-50 were heading to the swings at the school playing “Cowboy”.
It would have to be horrible to live life so afraid…
God help me if you are needed to be a witness of an actual crime!
My family witnessed the incident from our car and we thought it was real. As I waited for the crosswalk signal at the 7-Eleven on Lakeway, I saw several people fleeing with the look of abject terror on their faces. The I saw what I thought was a small man waving a gun toward cars stopped for him at the crosswalk. Both my wife and daughter ducked to the floor of the car and as the person to my left drove east through the crosswalk and past the gunman to get away, I took that opportunity to back into the left turn lane and turn around headed west, thus avoiding the gunman. I saw no orange tip on the gun, but I did report to dispatch that the gunman was a small old man and that he didn’t seem to be struggling to carry the weapon. Still, in light of recent mass shootings, I thought it prudent to act as if the threat were real.
cruz stuart