‘It was surreal’: Bite of Seattle attendee recalls fleeing gunfire, picking up fallen child amid ‘pure pandemonium’

Justin Smith was at the Bite of Seattle Sunday when gunfire erupted, leaving three people dead and wounding at least four in what officials are now calling a gang-related mass shooting.

Smith recalled the chaos on “The Gee and Ursula Show” on KIRO Newsradio, saying he was waiting in line for a honeycomb with around 50 other people.

“I was just in line, and you start talking to people in line, as you do, when you’ve been there for a while,” he said. “And these two sisters, I was talking to them, and all of a sudden we heard [gunshots], and I was like, ‘That doesn’t sound right. Sounds like fireworks.’ So I looked to my right, down the corridor, when I saw the second round of gunfire — what we now know is gunfire — and it was a flashbang. You could see it coming from a device. I couldn’t see the person, because there was a couple hundred people between us. But at that point, we knew it was gunfire, and I said, ‘Run!’ And that’s when we started running.”

Smith said just moments before the shooting, he took a video of what was a seemingly peaceful scene, with kids playing and running around and a man asleep on a bench. Then, not even an hour later, everything changed. As Smith ran from the gunfire, a child fell in front of him, and he stopped to pick the kid up. The two sisters he had been chatting with in line were running alongside him.

“It was kind of surreal,” he said. “But as I was running through that area, a kid had fallen while running, and so I picked him up. It was just really weird. I was just reacting in the moment. The two girls were with me. She dropped her shoe. She was wearing slippers. She tried to go back for it. I told her no, but she insisted, and then she started running barefoot, and we just got out of there. We ran for about four blocks straight.”

‘You think you’re still a target at any moment’: Bite of Seattle attendee feared the worst

Smith said he thought about the mass shooting in Las Vegas where the gunman was on a perch and striking people as they exited, so he had no idea what was going on or where the shots were coming from.

“You think you’re still a target at any moment,” he said. “You don’t know what’s going on. You don’t know who it’s from. If the guy’s walking around with a machine gun, you don’t know if it’s an AR. You don’t know what’s happening. It was very surreal in the moment. You’re at a heightened sense of awareness. It was just really crazy, pure pandemonium. Just people screaming and yelling and running.”

Tighter security needed at future outdoor events

Smith added that when he walked into the Bite of Seattle that day, he knew he was taking a risk. There was no visible security, no metal detectors, no controlled entry points, nothing to stop someone from walking into a massive crowd with a weapon. He said future events will need to be different, whether that means ticketed entry, more fencing, or something similar to prevent it from happening again.

“When there’s a lot of people walking into an area, a big group, that’s a perfect scenario for somebody to do something bad because there wasn’t security,” he said. “Obviously, nobody’s going to come into a Mariners game or a Seahawks game with an AR gun, right? Because there are so many security measures, they would be stopped before they came into that big crowd of people. But in this kind of environment, they don’t have that security. And so in the future, I foresee things changing. Obviously, our elected officials are probably going to have to do something different.”

Watch the full discussion in the video above.

Listen to Gee and Ursula on “The Gee and Ursula Show” weekday mornings from 9 am to 12 pm on KIRO Newsradio.