Re: It started as a Kansas City Chiefs celebration. Then the message spread: 'Guns, police, niggers shooting run'

[Mass Media Racism]

On 28 Mar 2022, Wi1liam T T <willy...@yahooomail.com> posted some
news:t1s7lu$383q1$1...@news.freedyn.de:

> The mass media becomes more racist every day. Most of the pictures of
> the shooting are all black or Mexican. White people are being
> marginalized.

The conquering heroes had just rolled down Grand Boulevard, waving to a
crowd packed more than a dozen deep – a sea of red, gold and white
against a clear blue sky, celebrating their Kansas City Chiefs’
second-in-a-row Super Bowl victory.

One after another, double-decker buses and open-topped SUVs had ferried
the likes of championship MVP Patrick Mahomes, star tight end Travis
Kelce and head coach Andy Reid, along with other coaches, relatives and
mascots, down the iconic thoroughfare as some 1 million fans – among
them countless kids who’d gotten the day off school – cheered.

Some Chiefs players at points had left their rides to walk the parade
route, high-fiving supporters and posing for selfies. There Wednesday on
the streets, too, were hundreds of police officers, many with chests
puffed out by protective vests.

Like at most major public events, they scanned for trouble.

Soon, the Chiefs entourage arrived at Union Station, the century-old
beaux-arts behemoth where all five World War I Allied commanders once
arrived by train. Onto a stage set up for the NFL rally, Kansas City’s
modern gridiron warriors hoisted the spoils of their latest, historic
battle: the sterling silver Vince Lombardi Trophy, now glinting in the
sun.

From above the crowd, the players and coaches hailed their legion of
fans. They hugged and sang. They basked in their glory while revelers
held cell phones aloft on video mode.

As confetti flew in the official festivities’ final moments, Jacob Gooch
Sr. – there in the vast crowd with his wife, daughter and son –
overheard an altercation, he told CBS.

“A girl” told someone: “Don’t do it, not here, this is stupid,” he said.

Then, Gooch’s wife and daughter saw a lady “holding (someone) back,” he
recalled to the network.

And they saw a gun get drawn.

“People had started backing up, and then he pulled it out,” Gooch told
CBS, “and just started shooting and spinning in a circle.”

In the main stage area, Manny Abarca and his 5-year-old daughter heard
the screams.

A flood of people rushed toward them as, through the crowd, a warning
quickly spread:

“Guns, police, run,” Abarca, a Jackson County legislator, later would
tell CNN’s Laura Coates.

The mayor, at Union Station, also “heard something.”

“A number of us start running,” Quinton Lucas later recalled, “and I see
a stream of officers going in (the) exact other direction with guns
drawn.”

Madison Anderes, 24 – in the crowd with her brother and mother – heard
what sounded like fireworks going off, she told CNN.

“He’s got a gun!” somebody yelled. “He’s got a gun!”

A second round of pops went off – this time much louder.

“That’s when all chaos broke out,” she said.

Everyone started running.

Anderes got knocked to the ground – and “felt like I was going to die.”

“I felt like a sitting duck,” she said, “and I was going to get shot.”

Abarca watched people get trampled in the chaos.

He picked up his daughter – and ran.

‘Stop this guy!’
Gooch was hit in the ankle, he told CBS. His son got hit, too, and so
did his wife – a bullet piercing straight through her calf.

Radio DJ Lisa Lopez-Galvan also was shot, the station where she
volunteered, KKFI 90.1 FM, later said. Her relatives, including two
nieces and a nephew, were injured, according to the mayor of suburban
Lee’s Summit, where her brother is mayor pro tempore.

A shooter took off on foot.

“Instinctually, I just took off running after him,” rallygoer Tony told
CNN. “He was hopping barriers, I was hopping barriers, just trying to
stay in somewhat distance of him and that way I could see a cop and
identify that was the guy.”

Amid the fleeing crowd, Paul Contreras – at the Chiefs rally with his
daughters – saw someone moving “in the opposite direction,” he told
CNN’s Erin Burnett on Wednesday.

“Stop this guy!” somebody yelled.

Contreras just had the right angle, he said, and hit the person from
behind, then tackled him.

“You don’t think about it,” Contreras said. “It’s just a reaction,”

A gun fell to the ground, he said.

Two others in the crowd quickly stepped in, leaning all their weight to
help hold the person down.

But, Contreras said, he kept struggling to get away.

‘Don’t answer the phone, don’t make noise’
Also on the ground somewhere nearby, Anderes managed to get up and run
with her brother and mother to a storefront, where about 10 others were
huddling, she said.

Elsewhere, Chiefs offensive lineman Trey Smith was looking for cover in
the crowded chaos zone, he told ABC News.

“There’s, like, a little kid in front of me, so I just grabbed him, just
yanked him, was telling him, ‘You’re hopping in here with me, buddy,’”
Smith said of the moment they joined 20 or so others in a closet.

Abarca, with his 5-year-old, found shelter in a nearby restaurant with
Kansas City Chiefs players, owners, family members and Reid, the Chiefs
head coach, he said.

His little girl, he said, went into “protocol mode,” telling her dad,
“This is like training.”

“It broke my heart to think about the reality that my daughter knows
what this is,” he told CNN’s Coates later as he decried the routine
nature in US schools of active shooter drills.

Abarca’s wife soon called him as news spread of the gunfire at the
Chiefs celebration.

But Abarca couldn’t answer.

“Because this is the protocol,” he said: “Don’t answer the phone, don’t
make noise.”

His phone battery depleting, Abarca, too, was desperate for more
information about what was happening outside the bathroom where he and
his child were sheltering.

He scrolled through X for new details, he said – and frantically tried
to return his wife’s texts.

Law enforcement, all the while, rushed toward the danger.

‘No one’s gonna hurt you’
Officers blitzed the crowd, including the spot Contreras and the other
good Samaritans were pinning the stranger to the ground – the gun lying
nearby.

“He was fighting the whole time,” Contreras told CNN. “And we were
fighting him to keep him down.”

Police soon arrived and handcuffed the person, he said.

By the time the gunfire ended, radio DJ Lopez-Galvan was dead, her
station and Abarca said, with police confirming a 43-year-old woman
died. Another 22 victims – ages 8 to 47 – had been shot, Chief Stacey
Graves said, adding half are younger than 16.

It wasn’t immediately clear if the person Contreras said he tackled was
among the three people – two of them juveniles – Kansas City police
detained after the shooting, which stemmed from a personal dispute,
Graves said. An unspecified number of guns were recovered, she said.

And just like that, the street so recently packed by Chiefs fans eager
to share in their team’s historic joy lay strewn with the empty coffee
cups, discarded folding chairs and abandoned bags indicative of yet
another mass shooting in America.

As unwitting survivors emerged from their hiding places, Smith stepped
out of the closet still clutching the World Wrestling Entertainment
championship belt he’d held as a prop through the Super Bowl parade and
headed for the team buses, he told ABC News.

On the way, he noticed a small boy who was “hysterical.”

Hoping to calm the child’s nerves, Smith handed him the belt, and the
two started talking about wrestling, he told ABC News.

“‘Hey, buddy, you’re the champion,’” Smith said. “‘No one’s gonna hurt
you. No one’s gonna hurt you, man. We got your back.’”

Abarca, still with his 5-year-old, “will never forget finally coming out
of the bathroom after hiding, sitting in the hallway,” he recalled to
“CNN This Morning” on Thursday.

Then, around the corner walked Reid with his grandchildren and his wife.

The men’s eyes met, Abarca said, “and I think we knew what we were
saying to each other.”

The head coach asked: “Are you guys OK?”

It was a moment of humility, Abarca said.

“That is the sentiment that is Kansas City,” he said. “It encompasses
who we are.”

Now, the hometown of rare back-to-back Super Bowl champs is left to
muster its strength as it faces a kind of horror more common across the
United States every day, from churches and schools to grocery stores,
outlet malls and hospitals.

“People … responded absolutely immediately,” the mayor said of the
gunfire at the Chiefs rally. “But I wish that we lived in a world where
they wouldn’t have to do that.”

“It seems,” Lucas said, “like almost nothing is safe.”

Correction: A previous version of this story incorrectly described Lisa
Lopez-Galvan’s relationship with KKFI 90.1 FM. She was a volunteer
there.

CNN’s Dakin Andone, Nouran Salahieh, Jamiel Lynch, Jillian Sykes, Kyle
Feldscher, Matias Grez, Amanda Jackson, Raja Razek, Sarah Dewberry,
Hannah Rabinowitz, Holmes Lybrand, Sara Smart, Chris Boyette, Shimon
Prokupecz, Josh Campbell and Rebekah Riess contributed to this report.

https://www.cnn.com/2024/02/15/us/chiefs-parade-shooting-kansas-city/inde
x.html