http://www.dallasnews.com/news/crime/he ... r-zone.eceThe panic had begun to subside. There was no sense in worrying anymore. The statistics final was almost over for Ramazan Arabaci's summer school session at El Centro College. The class, on the eighth floor of El Centro's Building A, normally ended at 8:30 p.m. But Arabaci was giving his students extra time to complete Thursday's exam. Apart from those wrapping up, a student waited patiently to chat with the professor, while a few more lingered in the eighth-floor hallway. Then, gunshots. Or was it something else? Tear gas canisters, perhaps?
The students were aware of the protest march going on that night. For one thing, parking was hard to get, with so many cars filing into downtown Dallas. Yet the seven students in Arabaci's class had no idea that floors below, Micah Johnson had targeted law enforcement officers in and around the El Centro campus, the result of his rampage five dead, and 11 more injured.
Three El Centro students - Daniela Ruiz, Kerry Griffiths and Karla Fierro - told The Dallas Morning News their stories Wednesday, giving a glimpse of the terror and confusion that reigned Thursday night. "We didn't know the seriousness of the situation," Ruiz said.
Griffiths, 25, arrived in the Dallas area three years ago from Kingston, Jamaica. Statistics was her last class at El Centro before heading off to TCU. Fierro and Ruiz were both full-time students at UT-Arlington, trying to squeeze some extra credits in over the summer. Fierro, 20, is studying criminology and criminal justice; Ruiz, 24, is an incoming senior in communications, with a minor in broadcasting. Griffiths was hanging out, waiting to talk with Arabaci after all the exams were in.
Arabaci did not respond to The Morning News' requests."And while waiting, I heard a lot of noise," Griffiths said. "I knew it was shots, because I'd heard shots before. And one guy was like, 'No, this is the police trying to calm the crowd with tear gas.'
But no, those were shots. There were, I think, 15 I heard at one time."
Griffiths left the classroom and headed to the other side of the building, near the elevators, to look under some blinds at the end of a hallway.
"I could see people running," she said. "I saw police out there with their guns."
At that point, though, there wasn't any panic for Griffiths. She went back to class and sat down, thinking the situation, however terrible, would be brief. So she informed Arabaci about what she saw, and the professor waited until everyone was finished, about 20 minutes or so, before the group decided to leave - on two trips of the elevator.
Fierro and three other students went first; while on their way down, one student tried to get in contact with someone on the elevator's emergency phone. As soon as the line picked up, the doors opened onto a chaotic scene in the first-floor lobby: glass everywhere, with the doors heading into the lobby from the street destroyed. An alarm was going off.
What they saw was the aftermath of Johnson trying to shoot his way into El Centro twice, first on Lamar Street and again on Elm.
The four stayed in the elevator for a moment, until shouts asking if someone was on the elevator.
"We responded yes," Fierro said, "and that's when they told us to come out with our hands in the air."
Ruiz and Griffiths' group came next - to a similar reception.
"I've never had a gun pointed at me, so to have more than 10 ... it felt like a war zone," Ruiz said.
"I was scared they were going to shoot, because of panic and stuff like that," Griffiths said. "I was kind of scared to go out, too, because I'm black. ... I'm not scared of cops; it's just because of what happened. But I was thinking - because of my skin - I might go out and they might shoot me. So, I let some of my classmates go first. I didn't go last; I kind of pushed myself in the middle."Ruiz said what happened next was like a movie - a swarm of officers guarding the exits while another officer yelled "move, move, move."
In separate batches, the groups were whisked outside, lined up against the exterior of Building A at the southeast corner of the campus.
And then, they waited.
"You could see in the garage, in front of the El Centro building, and there were a lot of snipers," Griffiths said. "Every single place you looked, you could see guns pointing out."Someone received an email from El Centro, telling students to stay in place. The building was on lockdown; these students were already outside. El Centro officials said that around 50 students observed lockdown procedures on the seventh and eighth floors of Building A. El Centro officer John Abbott, injured by glass shards when Johnson attempted to shoot his way in, helped evacuate 30 students from in the seventh floor at some point during the standoff.
One of Ruiz' classmates took to his smart phone - Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, e-mail - trying to piece together what was happening.
No one, including law enforcement, seemed to have a good understanding of what was underway, the trio said. Was there another shooter? What about bombs? Was there a subject on the loose?"To see that all around you, you don't even know what to think," Ruiz said.
Under guard, they stayed up against Building A for 30 minutes - until it was deemed safe to move them across Main Street into the bowels of the Texas Club parking garage.
And then, a two-hour wait.
Eventually moved from a stairwell to the basement, the students were questioned individually by police: "Did you see the shooter? Had we heard anything of this before?"
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