‘I think of them always,’ survivor of El Paso Walmart shooting says of those who were killed three years ago
EL PASO — An ominous cloud of white gun smoke, bloody police boot prints and an empty baby carrier on the body of Jordan Anchondo are images that will forever live in Jamie’s mind.
She can still hear the agonizing cries of men, women and children who had just seen their loved ones and complete strangers gunned down — including a heart wrenching “Noooo!” from Octavio Ramiro Lizarde, whose nephew, Javier Amir Rodriguez, was among those killed in the Aug. 3, 2019, mass shooting in El Paso.
Other things, she doesn’t remember so clearly. Like how she managed to crawl — her very pregnant belly at times touching the floor — from the teller counter to the vault room at First Convenience Bank inside the Walmart as gunshots rang out. Or how long she was locked inside that room before hearing police shout, “Anybody there?” after the shooting stopped.
“I’m dead. I’m going to die,” Jamie recalled thinking amid the chaos, believing the shooter was there to rob the bank. “Me and my baby are going to die.”
Jamie was 23, nearly nine months pregnant and a personal banker at First Convenience helping Anchondo with a transaction when a customer at the store’s cash registers nearby screamed, “Oh my God, he’s shooting!”
That alleged gunman, Patrick Crusius, then 21, is charged with more than 90 federal crimes alongside state capital murder charges. He allegedly drove some 650 miles to stop what he, in a manifesto, called “the Hispanic invasion” of Texas, killing 23 people and injuring dozens more. The FBI has classified the mass shooting — among the deadliest in recent U.S. history — as a domestic terrorist attack.
“I thought I was going to cry. But I feel at peace,” Jamie said last week while at the El Paso County Healing Garden memorial…