"Later, That Person Died." What I Saw Right After the Highland Park Shooting.

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This as-told-to essay is part of a short series explaining what it was like during the shooting at Highland Park. It is based on a conversation with Josh Leavitt, a 62-year-old who has lived in Highland Park since 1995. The conversation has been transcribed, condensed, and edited for clarity by Hannah Docter-Loeb.

I go to the parade every year, it’s a little slice of Americana here in Highland Park, I always got a kick out of it. I usually sit in a certain spot where there’s a Dairy Queen, which as it turned out would be one of the two spots where most of the shooting occured. This year,before the parade started, I went to get some coffee at the pancake house, which is about 40 yards up the street.

I was meeting my niece and her two young sons, 3 and 5 years old, and the parade had just started. It turned out that the area we moved to was also an area where they were shooting. There was a little break in the beginning of the parade, and we were at a corner, I was on the south west side, so behind us there was a cosmetic store, to our right was this pancake house, kitty corner from us was Uncle Dan’s, and across from us was Ross’s. Ross’s and Uncle Dan’s is where it turned out the shooter was right across the street.

I heard firecracker-type noise, thought it was a firecracker, it was pretty loud, but it was the Fourth of July. Then I heard another staccato burst of it, and then I’m thinking, ‘boy, this is a real jerk.’ And I start looking around to see who’s blasting firecrackers. I didn’t look up because I thought it was someone just blasting them on the ground. It was right then where I saw people starting to duck and cover. In that moment, I still thought it was possible that it was firecrackers and not anything else.

I had these two little kids and my niece, and we really didn’t have a place ourselves to cover. Behind us, there was a Bluemercury store, and we went into there. I wasn’t even sure it was open, but it turned out there was a store manager in there and she let us in, and we were the only ones in the store. We ended up moving the kids away from the windows, she gave them some paper and pens to color with. And we basically watched everything that transpired outside.

*snip*