One of the men who stopped a suspect in the Kansas City Chiefs parade shooting called the effort to tackle him and hold him down for police “America stuff.”
At least one person was killed and as many as 21 other people were wounded Wednesday at the Chiefs’ Super Bowl parade in Kansas City, according to NBC News. Of the wounded, eight had “immediately life-threatening” injuries while seven had life-threatening injuries, Kansas City Fire Chief Ross Grundyson said.
Chiefs fan Trey Filter of Wichita, Kansas, was not sure what was taking place, but as he heard voices calling “get him,” he knew what he needed to do.
“My brain tells me, ‘That must be him,’” Filter told the New York Post.
“I literally remember when I was tackling him, ‘I sure hope this is who they were yelling at me to get.’ Because I just went, ‘Boom!’ … I really don’t recall seeing him coming,” he said of the man, who was among three people arrested in the shooting.
The man did not go quietly but struggled as Filter and another man tried to keep him down. In the struggle, the gun was dropped, leading Casey Filter, Trey’s wife, to grab it.
“I don’t know if I knocked him out when I tackled him or what, but I had him squeezed so hard, he might have been passed out all the time for all I know. I just started racking him in his ribs,” Filter said.
“I was just yelling, ‘F your gun!’ and I was just hitting him in his ribs. It was great. You know, America stuff,” Filter said.
Fliter said he, his wife and his two sons felt safe with the heavy police presence. “Then it’s almost like a mouse is loose in the house and everybody’s jumping,” he said.
He said the family went to the Super Bowl celebration because he wanted to please his sons.
“I literally just wanted to get some good points in my kids. I felt bad for taking them out of school, but it’s a unique situation, we’re in Kansas. ‘Let’s go to this thing.’ We went last year. I just wanted some dad points. I’m really glad we’re not in the other boat that those people are in,” Filter said.
Filter told KAKE-TV in Wichita that he and the other bystander “were looking at one another. You know, like, ‘Hell yeah, like we got this guy.'”
“And so then people were still yelling, ‘He’s got a gun. He has a gun.’ We were just focused on keeping him down. And then, you know, kind of make sure he didn’t go anywhere,” he said.
Paul Contreras of Omaha, Nebraska, said that after hearing what he and his three daughters thought were fireworks, he saw a man running and joined in the effort to stop him.
“The whole time he’s fighting to get up and run away,” Contreras told KETV-TV. “We’re fighting each other, you know. We’re fighting to keep him down and he’s fighting to get up.”
“I just heard somebody yelling to stop this guy, tackle him and he was coming in the opposite direction,” the Omaha man said, according to KSHB-TV.
“You don’t think about it, it’s just a reaction. He got close to me, I got the right angle on him, and I hit him from behind. And when I hit him from behind I either jarred the gun out of his hand or out of his sleeve, ’cause as I’m taking him down to the ground, I see the gun on the ground,” Contreras said.
“He’s just fighting to get up, but we’re fighting to keep him down,” he said.
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.