An eyewitness to the aftermath of Monday’s shooting at the Washington, D.C. Navy Yard described the chaotic situation to TPM, including a moment where she watched a wounded man being dragged away from the scene.
Bettina Ramon, a 33-year-old employee at Calvary Women’s Services, said she arrived at 8:30 a.m. ET on the corner of M Street and New Jersey Avenue to catch a bus, half a mile away from the Naval Sea Systems Command building where the shooting took place. She initially didn’t pay attention to a few police cars headed toward the building. “That’s kind of typical,” she said.
But then the volume of police cars increased and another bystander told Ramon and others that shots had been fired. Little did Ramon know, she had arrived at the bus stop at the same time that the shootings reportedly started.
“Things just really picked up after that,” she said. “It’s kind of a blur. It was happening so fast.”
At some point, Ramon said she and some other bystanders at the bus stop saw a man being dragged across a street in front of a CVS pharmacy. At first, Ramon thought the man had suffered a heart attack until other bystanders deduced that he had been shot, based on reports from Twitter. After that, she tried to look away.
The wounded man, who was wearing khaki pants and a blue button-up shirts, did not appear to be a law enforcement officer. People were attending to him on the ground in front of the pharmacy, though Ramon never saw him taken away from the scene in an ambulance.
Ramon said she never heard any gun shots, nor saw anybody who appeared to be a gunman.
Police at the scene didn’t tell bystanders what was happening, Ramon said, and she didn’t ask. She was looking for a way to leave the scene.
“I think I felt at first confused, scared. Both of those feelings started increasing. I wound up feeling terrified,” Ramon said. “I just wanted to leave. I just wanted to get out of there. I couldn’t figure out how to do that.”
Eventually, she asked a man in uniform if she could leave and was given the OK after being stuck there for about 20 minutes.
Correction: This post has been updated to correct the name of Ramon’s employer to Calvary Women’s Services.
