Natalie Lorentz and her household had simply sat down on the curb to watch the Fourth of July parade when the shooting in Highland Park, Illinois, started. Lorentz, who was there along with her three younger boys, husband and mom, stated the shooting sounded “like rapid fire.”
“We got down on the ground as fast as we could, and my husband saw a shooter and was like, ‘There’s a shooter.’ Then we got up and started running,” Lorentz informed CBS News. “I grabbed my youngest son. My husband had my other two kids. My mom was running with us. She fell and got separated from us.”
Lorentz’s mom, Andrea, stated she fell subsequent to somebody who had been shot.
“The guy next to me looked like his leg was shot off and the woman in front of him was completely covered with blood,” she stated. “When I saw that I’m like, ‘You just need to get up and run.'”
Lorentz, who quickly reunited along with her mom, stated her intuition was to defend her youngsters from the bloodshed round them.
“People that had been shot, that we were trying to shield the kids so they didn’t see, they were being taken away to an ambulance and we just kept walking, trying to get away from there,” she stated.
Lorentz informed CBS News that it was the worst second of her life. She believes two dad and mom sitting inches away from her household did not survive the shooting.
“I feel like I am still in shock,” she stated. “I feel like I am still in complete panic mode. I don’t know how to even make sense of this or begin to process this when I keep thinking that could have been us. How did we survive? Like, why did we survive?”
She now worries what the future holds for her household.
“It used to be a freak occurrence and now this is not,” she stated. “This is commonplace. This is a fact of life. This is the world that we live in right now, and that we are raising our kids in and it is not OK.”
story by The Texas Tribune Source link