…and under the circumstances, “haven’t we all?” isn’t the right response. One person was killed and several others injured in a shooting spree at Toronto’s Eaton Centre Saturday night, and the Jays’ Lawrie was apparently sampling some of the food court’s offerings just seconds before gunfire errupted. From the Toronto Star’s Brendan Kennedy :
“We just heard bang, bang, bang, bang, bang. As fast as you could pull a trigger.”
Lawrie said he was skeptical that it actually could have been gunfire until he saw panicked shoppers running up the stairs in his direction.
“It was instant panic, it was almost as if you stepped on an anthill and everyone just flooded right out of the whole place,” he said.
“Once we saw people running up the stairs and you saw the looks on their faces, like this wasn’t a little thing, that’s when I knew it was time to get out of there.”
Lawrie, an avid Twitter user with 128,691 followers, was among the first people to tweet reports of the shooting and pictures from the scene.
“I just thought I’d give it out there just to anybody who could have been near the mall or anybody who needed to get there ASAP, I thought I’d give them a good piece of information.”
“It was kind of one of those things when you wonder, ‘Was it real or was it not?’” he said. “You kind of think to yourself, ‘Are those shots?’ Like, ‘That’s not going to happen at the Eaton Centre mall.’