Article content continued

“He was gurgling,” she said Sunday. “I looked him in the eye. I tried to talk to him. I said ‘Hang on, buddy.’” But he didn’t survive.

She said another man next to her screamed the name Patricia.

“They were like ‘She’s gone,’” Redman said. “And he was like, ‘No. Please, God. Tell me it’s not true.’”

There were bodies “everywhere you looked,” she said. “It was like World War II. I just started crying and looking at all these people. That could have been us. Three or four minutes, and that could have been us.”

I looked him in the eye. I tried to talk to him. I said ‘Hang on, buddy'

Williams said he was told that the bouncer at Ned Peppers had prevented the gunman from entering the bar, which opened onto a crowded dance floor. In a Facebook message, Ned Peppers said the bouncer “was sent to the hospital for shrapnel-related” injuries but was expected to recover.

Williams, who also has a civilian job at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base outside the city, said he had watched the news of the El Paso, Texas, mass shooting earlier on Saturday. At the time, he said, he thought it was “just another mass shooting that we hear about all the time, and you never think it’s going to hit home.”

He said he counted at least seven bodies, including one in the doorway of Ned Peppers, which had been handcuffed. That was the gunman, he said the police told him. A backpack lay nearby.

“You just wouldn’t believe the people who have pulled together and tried to save these people, and there wasn’t any saving,” Williams said. “Most of them were probably dead.”

Police officers were nearby, potentially averting a bigger tragedy

At least nine people were killed and at least 27 were wounded in a shooting early Sunday in Dayton, Ohio, the second deadly American mass shooting in less than 24 hours and the third in a week.

The shooting began at 1:07 a.m. on East Fifth Street in the city’s Oregon entertainment district, which was bustling with more than 1,000 late-night revelers enjoying a warm summer evening, Mayor Nan Whaley said. Uniformed officers on routine patrol in the area responded, shooting and killing the gunman within one minute of his first gunshots, she said.

“While this is a terribly sad day for our city, I am amazed by the quick response of Dayton Police that saved literally hundreds of lives,” she said at a news conference.