Survivor of El Paso shooting praised for distracting gunman by throwing bottles
A survivor of last week's deadly mass shooting in El Paso is being hailed for his heroism after he attempted to distract the gunman by throwing bottles at him.
Speaking to CNN from his hospital bed, Christopher Grant, 50, dismissed the praise, claiming that "any man that's a man would have done" what he did.
On Saturday, Grant reportedly heard gunshots from inside the produce department at a Walmart and instinctively ran toward his mother, whom he described as a "gun-wielding grandma."
"An hour before we went to Walmart, she decides, 'Oh, we're just going to Walmart. I'm going to put [the gun] in my room," he said. "So when I went to her, no gun. And I was like, 'Oh my God, you gotta be kidding me.'"
Grant said the next thing he remembers was seeing the gunman — whom the police later identified as a 21-year-old white male from Allen, Texas — standing in the parking lot and shooting at shoppers.
"I was like, 'This is crazy,'" he recalled. "So to deter him, I started throwing random bottles at him."
One of the bottles purportedly hit the gunman, who allegedly responded by shooting at Grant.
"When I got hit, it was like somebody putting a hand grenade in your back and pulled the pin," he said. "That's basically what it felt like."
Despite getting shot, Grant said he forced himself to get up amid the loud cries from shoppers who begged the gunman to spare them. Most of them, like many of the residents of El Paso, were Hispanic.
"He had no remorse for their lives at all," Grant said of the shooter.
Grant said he was able to escape to safety after an officer from U.S. Customs & Border Protection patched him up and threw him in the back of a pickup truck.
"She was like my guardian angel," he said tearfully. "I'll forever be indebted to her because I honestly think she saved my life."
Saturday's mass shooting in Texas left 22 dead, including a couple who shielded their 2-month-old baby from gunfire, and several dozens injured. Authorities said they are treating the incident as a domestic terrorism case, and investigators are considering hate crime charges after they came across a racist, anti-immigrant manifesto that was allegedly written by the suspect. The district attorney said that officials would seek the death penalty.
Less than 24 hours following the shooting in El Paso, another man opened fire in a popular nightlife area in Dayton, Ohio, killing nine and injuring at least 26 others. Responding officers shot and killed the gunman, but authorities have yet to determine a motive in that case.
In the days since both shootings, President Trump has issued a series of controversial remarks — from tying the need to pass background-check legislation with immigration reform to blaming gun violence on video games and mental illness.
"The perils of the internet and social media cannot be ignored, and will not be ignored," he said.
Studies have shown, however, that there is no correlation between shootings and video games.
