BOULDER, Colo. — As shots rang out inside the supermarket King Soopers off Table Mesa Road in Boulder Monday afternoon, staff inside the store was directing customers to the back and telling them to exit as safely as possible.
One of those customers was Andrew Hummel.
“I heard a loud bang and then everybody kind of sprinted toward the back of the store,” Hummel told KMGH’s Adi Guajardo near the store as police continued to work an active shooter situation which was first reported at around 2:45 p.m. Monday. “I didn’t see anything; I could just hear… and I just ran – I just wanted to get out of there. There was so much going on in such a compact area.”
Hummel said as soon as he got out, he immediately called his parents and his friend and roommate Mason, who works at the store.
“It was a truly horrifying experience,” Hummel said, recalling the chaos inside the grocery store.
Hummel said his first priority was making sure Mason got out safe, and later Mason was hiding in a storage room with other customers.
“One of the biggest scary texts he sent, he just said, ‘I love you guys. Thank you for everything in case things go bad.’ That was a really hard text, especially me being in this situation,” Hummel said. “That was something I would never want to hear from any of my friends. It was horrifying. It was truly horrifying.”
For Neven and Qinlyn Sloan, who were also inside at the time the shooting started, a normal day at the store ended with loud bangs.
“I just heard a big bang and I was like, ‘That’s kind of weird.’ Like, I didn’t know if it was like a gunshot or whatever, but it was probably three seconds before we heard another just like, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang and I immediately sprinted over to her and was like, ‘Hey, we gotta get outta here' and like, pushed out the emergency door,’” said Neven, who added that while he never saw the shooter, he did talk to someone at the front who saw someone go down.
Neven told KMGH’s Sloan Dickey he and another man named Michael helped people get away from the scene.
The newly married couple told KMGH they stayed at the scene to pray for those affected by the shooting.
Sarah Moonshadow told KMGH she’d been coming to that King Soopers daily for a while as she lives about a mile away.
This is a developing story and will be updated.
This story was first published by Oscar Contreras at KMGH.
