Amid chaos, some at July 4 parade ran toward gunfire to help

HIGHLAND PARK, Ill. (AP) — Bobby Shapiro ran down Central Avenue in socks, moving toward the street corner where gunfire had erupted just moments before. At first, he only wanted to confirm that what he was hearing was real — a mass shooting at a July 4 parade in Highland Park.

Any sense of disbelief vanished with the sight of bone fragments, blood and pieces of flesh lying in the street where a parade was marching just minutes before. Then he saw the bodies.

“It was pure horror. It was a battle zone,” Shapiro, 52, said in an interview. When the gunshots first went off, he had been changing out of his cycling shoes about 100 yards away.

Emergency vehicles and first responders were not yet at the scene, so Shapiro, a tech salesman with no medical training, began doing whatever he could to help.

From the bystanders who tied tourniquets and administered CPR to the fleeing paradegoers who rescued and cared for an orphaned two-year-old covered in blood, people from every corner of the Highland Park community sprung into action on July 4 in the wake of unspeakable tragedy.

Nearly a dozen people, including off-duty doctors, nurses and a football coach, were among the first to administer lifesaving assistance to victims of the parade shooting.

“Things happen so quickly that your brain can’t possibly comprehend that there is an active shooter in your town, in your sleepy little neighborhood,” said Dr. Wendy Rush, an anesthesiologist with decades of experience working in trauma centers.

Rush joined Shapiro in trying to save an elderly man who had a gunshot wound in his thigh and another that left a gaping hole in his abdomen.

While Rush used a ventilation mask and bag to help the elderly man breathe, Shapiro and another bystander took turns giving chest compressions and...