A woman who works in the business next door said workers were terrified by the shooting.



Geri Rubel, an accountant at a firm in an adjoining part of the bank building, said that about 11:30 a.m., she heard two bursts of rapid, automatic gunfire outside, one short and one long. She and her co-workers looked out the front window of her office and saw men with guns running through the parking lot toward the bank.



"That scared the (expletive) out of us," she said. "We locked the door, went to a corner of the room and cried because we didn't know what was going on. I thought of my kids, and called the high school (to alert them)."



They peeked out the window occasionally to see what was happening, until a McHenry County Sheriff's deputy came to the office to tell them that investigators had been staking out a robbery of the bank and one suspect was killed and the other was arrested.



Rubel said the body of the dead man was lying in the parking lot, and the other man was taken away in handcuffs in a black SUV. The men she saw with the guns turned out to be law enforcement agents.



"This kind of thing doesn't happen ever here," Rubel said. "I hear about it in the city (of Chicago). This is a small town. It's not something you expect to see here."



The police response was so quick that it was obvious they anticipated the robbery, she said. "To have all of them within 30 seconds, I'm thinking they must have known something," Rubel said.