A man driving a motorized shopping cart shot an Anchorage Walmart assistant manager during a dispute over the man's unrestrained dog on a busy Saturday afternoon inside the Midtown store, police said.
Police arrested the suspect minutes later. Medics rushed the victim, a man shot once in his midsection, to a hospital in stable condition, police said. The store was not shut down, a police sergeant said, and business continued as usual minutes later, with many shoppers unaware a shooting had taken place.
Police later identified the shooter as Daniel Pirtle, 45. The victim, Jason Mahi, 33, was in surgery Saturday afternoon, a police spokeswoman said.
Pirtle, a double amputee with metal, prosthetic legs, came into Walmart with his service dog not on a leash, police Sgt. Cameron Hokenson said.
Mahi is an assistant manager at the store, according to Walmart. He asked the man to leave, police said.
"There was some kind of dispute," Hokenson said. "They were escorting him out of the store and something happened on the way out where the suspect pulled out a weapon and shot the employee."
A man driving a motorized shopping cart in Wal-Mart shoots a store employee because he is not controlling his dog? Hard to believe this happened in Anchorage.
Wasilla, sure. But Anchorage?
Now not to sound hypocritical but I do more or less give a pass to people carrying guns in Alaska. After all we are constantly surrounded by various large carnivores that would indeed devour us if given the chance, so carrying a gun for protections does not necessarily mean that this guy was "compensating" or anything.
The off-duty sergeant and police officers arriving in about a dozen police cruisers caught Pirtle near the front entrance to the store, Hokenson said. Officers put him in handcuffs and took a handgun from him, said Wayne Toovak, a witness.
"It was a big, long gun," Toovak said.
I stand corrected.
Army Sgt. Carlos Morales was almost more troubled by the store's reaction to the shooting than to the shooting itself:
Morales said it upset him that the store's employees did not do more to warn other shoppers, many of them with children and oblivious to what had happened. Nobody knew if the suspect was still in the store or if he was dangerous, Morales said.
"Some people were frantic. Some people were just shopping, because they didn't know," he said. "We didn't know if it was a live shooter, going crazy shooting up the store. ... You can't just continue checking people out, like everything is normal."
Welcome to Wal-Mart.
I actually do not shop in Wal-Mart anymore because it is the one place on earth that actually makes me question the validity of Darwinian Evolution.
And if anybody was EVER going to be shot by a man sitting in a motorized shopping cart, where else do we think it would be? Wal-Mart.
0 comments:
Post a Comment