http://blogs.seattleweekly.com/dailyweekly/2012/05/mass_murder_update_hero_threw.phpMass Murderer Update:
'Hero' Threw Stools at Ian Stawicki as He Fired Away, Saving 3 LivesBy Rick Anderson Thu., May 31 2012 at 3:06 PM Comments (6)
Updated Friday, 6:30 a.m. An unnamed "hero" threw two bar stools at Ian Stawicki as he began firing off his .45 caliber handgun in a murderous rampage yesterday that left five dead, allowing as many as three people to escape likely death, police officials said today.
The hero, though, shied from the label, saying he was obeying a vow never to back down from violence after his brother died in the 9/11 terror bombings.Assnt. Chief Jim Pugel said the department would leave it up to the man he called a hero to identify himself if he wished. But his actions clearly prevented a higher body count at Cafe Racer, where five were shot, four of them fatally, yesterday morning, police said.
The man referred to by Pugel didn't want to be identified but did allow police to issue statements by him. Using only his first name, Lawrence, he told SPD's Jonah Spangenthal-Lee,
"Just before it happened, I was looking at [Stawicki] He'd just been told he was 86'd [from the café] in a very polite manner."Lawrence says he looked down at his phone for a moment, and then, he says, "I hear the pop, pop, and people scrambling. I couldn't make sense of it. I didn't expect the gun to be that quiet. I thought 'this is really happening.'" As Stawicki opened fire in the café, Lawrence, grabbed a bar stool and used it to try to fight off Stawicki and defend his friends.
"I just threw the frigging stool at him, legs first," he says.
"My brother died in the World Trade Center. I promised myself," if something like this ever happened, "I would never hide under a table."Authorities have now released the names of the other victims killed by Stawicki. Besides musicians Drew Keriakedes, 45, and Joe "Vito" Albanese, 52, also slain at the cafe were dental assistant and aspiring actress Kimberly Layfield, 38, and Donald Largen, a 57-year-old urban planner and musician.
Gloria Koch Leonidas, 52, a Bellevue mother of two, was murdered by Stawicki after he fled and stole her car. Cafe chef Leonard Meuse, 46, shot in the jaw, is still hospitalized but is expected to recover.
Depty Chief Nick Metz said he viewed a video of the cafe shooting taken by security cameras and, in 30 years of police work, "I've never seen anything more horrific and callous and cold," he observed at an afternoon press conference at Police Headquarters.
In the video, not yet released, the bearded Stawicki, 40, a lean six-footer, sits quietly, then as a man rises to leave, Stawicki rises, pulls his weapon, and walks up behind the man, shooting him in the back of the head.
He then moves to a wider position near a wall and begins firing at others sitting close by as the hero tries to distract him, throwing one chair, then another. At one point, Stawicki trains his gun on the stool-thrower, who escaped unhurt, police said.
Stawicki, Lawrence says, "looked at me like he didn't [care] at all. He just moved towards the rear of the bar instead of dealing with me at all, and I just brushed past him. He was on a mission to kill my friends."
"I wasn't a hero," Lawrence told SPD, pointing out that a café employee, who was wounded in the shooting, was able to call 911 and "lucidly" give police information about the shooting. "He's the hero," Lawrence says.
Though police arrived within minutes, Stawicki had fled by car or bus to First Hill above downtown Seattle, where he hijacked a black Mercedes SUV that had just been parked by Leonidas. She'd just dropped off a friend at Town Hall and was returning with a parking lot ticket for her vehicle when Stawicki confronted her.