'He just shot through the door': Injured airman describes NAS Pensacola shooting

Ryan Mills | Pensacola News Journal

The gunman approached the door. He did not open it.

He opened fire, shooting out the glass and spraying bullets inside the office, where Ryan Blackwell and two colleagues took cover after hearing gunshots down the hall.

It lasted 15 seconds. Maybe 20. Then the gunman moved on, Blackwell, 27, recalled Saturday from the Baptist Hospital intensive care unit in Pensacola.

Blackwell was one of the eight people wounded at the Naval Air Station Pensacola, where a Saudi man opened fire at about 6:30 a.m. Friday. Three others were killed, as was the gunman, who authorities have identified as Mohammed Saeed Alshamrani, a Saudi military member who was training at the base.

Blackwell, a Navy airman and assistant high school wrestling coach, was shot in his right arm and in his pelvis. His intestines were severed by ricocheting bullets, he said.

Moments after shots were heard

Blackwell works at the international military training office on the first floor, where he processes paperwork for international students. When they first heard shots being fired in the hallway, they closed the door to their office and took cover, hoping the gunman would pass them by. He didn’t.

“He didn’t come inside,” Blackwell said. “He just shot through the door.”

Blackwell said he shielded a female colleague with his body. All three of the office workers, all Navy airmen, were shot.

When the gunman moved on, Blackwell said he realized they needed to escape before he came back.

“My adrenaline was pumping so much,” he recalled. “I wasn’t worried about being shot. I was worried about getting us to safety and getting us out of there.”

With his right arm shot and bloodied, Blackwell used his left arm to open an office window. He and his co-workers jumped out of the building and ran to safety.

Blackwell said he used his belt as a tourniquet on his arm to stop the bleeding. He then called another co-worker who hadn’t made it to work yet.

“I told him we needed to go to the hospital because we were bleeding out,” Blackwell said.

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Narrowly avoiding more casualties

The co-worker arrived in a truck and drove his three injured colleagues to the main gate. They got into a police car, which took them to the hospital, Blackwell said.

“We could have been three more casualties if we didn’t escape,” Blackwell said.

Blackwell said he never saw the gunman’s face during the attack. But afterwards he was shown a picture of the suspect and “the face did look familiar.”

“He used to be a student in my office,” Blackwell said of the shooter. He said he doesn’t know anything about Alshamrani. “All the international aviation students come through my office.”

Blackwell, a former state wrestling champion from Cape Carteret, North Carolina, is an assistant wrestling coach at nearby Gulf Breeze High School. He was planning to leave early Friday to get to a two-day tournament that started Friday.

“Once I got to the hospital I called the wrestling coach and said ‘I won’t be able to make it to the tournament this weekend. I got shot,’” Blackwell recalled.

“I told the coach to tell the guys good luck.”

Blackwell said he expects to fully recover from his injuries: “l’ll be fine.”