Since the idiotic Columbus Dispatch isn't available without charge online, we must resort to AP for details from the Dispatch's Sunday update on the Damageplan shootings story:
- Concertgoers who witnessed a fatal nightclub shooting frantically called emergency operators on cell phones and tried to resuscitate the wounded, with some having to wash victims' blood from their hands, faces and clothes afterward.
....Billy Clark climbed over a barricade and reached onto the stage to try to help slain guitarist "Dimebag" Darrell Abbott after he was shot.
"I said, 'We've got to get him out of here. He's still a target,'" Clark recalled.
...."I'm not sure if the soldier in me took over. He was up there bleeding and needed help," said Clark, an Army veteran who carried Abbott off the stage with at least three others and began to attempt CPR. Abbott was later pronounced dead at the scene.
....Aaron Barns, a sound technician for the show, said a man later identified as Gale approached the tour bus shortly before the band took the stage to ask if Abbott and his brother, drummer Vinnie Paul Abbott, were on board.
....At least 10 people called 911 when shootings broke out, several from inside the club.
"The person is still loose with the gun," Linda Moore, 42, of Columbus, told the emergency operator. "Please hurry, please."
As police officers arrived, Gale grabbed one of his victims, whom authorities have declined to name, and began using him as a shield. Some bystanders pointed at Gale and screamed for officers to shoot him.
Officer James D. Niggemeyer, 31, entered through the back door of the club and killed Gale with a single blast from his shotgun, authorities said.
"I had to do it. I had to do it," bystanders recalled Niggemeyer as saying immediately afterward.
Article comments