On Sunday, a man entered a Las Vegas Starbucks after his credit card was declined at the drive thru and fired twice into the ceiling before he fatally shot a man in the chest.
Customer Medin Gebrezgier told KVVU that people in the Starbucks were crying as they dropped to the floor when Pedro Jose Garcia started to fire his gun.
“We were afraid,” Gebrezgier recalled. “We didn’t know what was going to happen next. I had no idea what to do. I heard about this stuff on TV and movies, but it was all the way real.”
“I thought this was a joke at first,” Gebrezgier added. “I thought this was a recording. Someone was gonna come in, this would be a prank, and it was real. Once he let off those rounds my mind went blank. I was like ‘what’s going on?'”
Garcia called 911 after the shooting and described someone else as being responsible for the shots, but when investigators began to question witnesses, they identified him as the one responsible.
“Everybody was kind of frozen until they saw he left,” Gebrezgier recalled. “Then everybody started running.”
Garcia has since been arrested on murder, robbery, burglary and weapon charges.