'I felt like I was dead': Primo Pizza worker recounts battle with Cross Creek Mall gunman

One of the managers of a Cross Creek Mall pizza stand who thwarted an armed assailant on Wednesday wasn’t even supposed to be working that day — but fate keeps its own schedule.

Jonathan Morales, 35, was the pizza shop employee who got into a wrestling match with a gunman who had leaped over the counter to go after a cashier.

The trouble began, Morales said Thursday, when a man, later identified by police as Michael Floyd, 41, became upset that he had to wait for change for a $20 bill he used to pay for lunch.

Morales, who's worked at Primo Pizza since he was 16, said he had stopped into the restaurant “for one simple thing,” when he overheard Floyd berating the cashier for needing to get change from the back.

It was when the cashier returned with the change — and apparently had had enough of the customer’s insults — that an expletive-filled argument erupted, Morales said.

“I heard them fussing at each other, and (Floyd) kept on saying ‘Don’t make me go back there,’” Morales said, some 24 hours after one of the most harrowing experiences of his life.

“So that’s when I said, ‘You have your change, you have your food, if there’s anything you need, let us know, but have a good day,’” he said.

The intervention seemed to work, Morales recalled. He said the customer asked where the condiments were, went to the condiment stand, and then — after giving the two employees dirty looks — exited the building through the food court doors.

The calm before the storm

Once the man had left the building, Morales thought the crisis was over.

Yet moments later, he recalled, he saw the man walking back toward the food court through the parking lot.

"I thought he was coming back to complain about something. I didn’t know he was going to come back and do what he did," Morales said.

Instead of complaining, he said, the customer pulled a gun from his waistband and charged at the counter.

“He comes and he has his gun in his hand, and he jumps the counter. ... At this point, it was fight or flight,” Morales recalled.

"I had to do something then and there," he said. The people at this pizza shop are like family to him. This place is like home, he said.

So, Morales jumped on the gunman and tried to wrestle away the gun.

“Every second felt like minutes and hours," he said.

As the men battled for control of the weapon — the customer with his finger on the trigger; Morales trying to wrench the gun away — a shot rang out, puncturing a hole in a beer keg.

Morales said that after the shooting, everyone fled, and he and his attacker fought their way into the back of the restaurant where Morales gained control of the gun.

That’s when the man with “pretty big arms” wrapped both of them around a kneeling Morales’ neck and began to squeeze, he said.

“He has me in a massive chokehold. I felt like my life force was coming out of my body. At that point — I’m not gonna lie to you — at that point — I felt like I was dead.”

But thoughts of his mother and memories of his late grandfather fueled his strength, he said.

'I mustered up whatever I could'

“We have had a lot of death recently in my family, and this is not what I wanted for my mother,” Morales said. “So I mustered up whatever I could.”

Morales struggled to his feet, and, with the customer still choking him from behind, the manager began bashing his assailant on the head with the gun.

For a person who has never held or fired a weapon, Morales said, the thought of shooting the man never entered his mind.

But the pistol-whipping opened a wound on the attacker’s head. Blood dotted the floor afterward, Morales said.

The struggle was over not long after when the two ended up in a hallway that leads to the outside and a security guard there called for backup.

Morales said that he had somehow gotten outside the back door and the customer had finally let go of him and run back into the kitchen, escaping the same way he gained entry — by jumping the counter.

Outside in the parking lot, a combat veteran, who said he was sitting in his car when he saw Floyd tuck a gun into his pants as he walked toward the food court, saw Floyd — his head bloodied — walking away. Former infantryman Robert Williams said he followed Floyd to an unpopulated area of the parking lot, then using his own gun, ordered Floyd to the ground. He held him there until police arrived.

'It was pandemonium'

The events of Wednesday are not something Morales ever thought he'd be involved in.

The New Jersey-born North Carolina transplant said he’s seen a lot in his nearly two decades working at the pizza stand, but "this is the craziest thing I've seen.

“It was pandemonium. I thought — if my life is in danger; if I’m going to down, I’m going to go down swinging,” he said. “When I’ve told the story to people they are like, 'I don't know how you did it.'

“I don't know how I did it, either.”

F.T. Norton can be reached at fnorton@fayobserver.com.

This article originally appeared on The Fayetteville Observer: Primo Pizza worker recounts battle with Cross Creek Mall gunman