Former Seahawk describes witnessing Bellevue nightclub shooting

Former Seahawk Marcus Trufant and University of Washington football player Terry Hollimon have never been in a massacre situation like the one Sunday in Orlando, but they can relate with the panic that comes with being involved in a shooting at a nightclub.

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Both members of the Barbershop described their experiences Tuesday with KIRO Radio’s “Tom and Curley.” Trufant said he and his wife were at the Munchbar nightclub in Bellevue on Christmas Eve in 2012 that left one person dead.

Trufant said he didn’t hear the shots, just read the movements of the crowd.

“All of a sudden things kind of shift and you see unusual movement: People trying to hide and scatter and moving around,” he said. “And you don’t really catch on until you really know. As people who are running to the back trying to hide in the kitchen and do all that kind of stuff. You just get up and run, you don’t really wait to see what’s next. I was with my wife, too. So we both had to get out of there.”

Hollimon said he’s witnessed multiple shootings and noted that the situations should not be glorified or normalized. Nonetheless, he says there is a definite feeling that something ominous is brewing when you’ve been in enough of those situations.

“You see that crowd just shuffle and move,” he said. “There’s a big commotion before you even hear or see anything. You just see a commotion of people start darting in various directions. Some people hit the ground, some people dive behind things. And then you’ll hear the pop-pop-pop.”

Hollimon said he was at a club in Seattle where a friend of his was shot in the chest after the gunman was bounced from the club and came back from a car with a gun.

“I was actually not close to (my friend) when it happened but we heard the shots,” Hollimon said. “I was beside some other guys who were playing for the Seahawks at the time and we hit the ground. We started crawling and we ended up crawling into a broom closet where he hid out until the gunshots stopped.”

Trufant said the shooting he witnessed caused him to think twice about going back to clubs but didn’t stop him entirely.

“Personally, being young and at times having a Superman complex, you do go back to scenes like that,” he said. “Sometimes nothing may happen again or if it’s a situation where it’s a certain type of crowd or you hear stuff on the street that something could happen again – retaliation, or stuff like that –  I wouldn’t go back.”

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