Chapter Twenty (Partial) Besides just looking for ways to prevent retail theft, I had a few ancillary duties at the Strawbridge & Clothier department store for which I was responsible. One of them was at 5:00PM every weekday, and 3:00PM every Saturday. The specific and rather simplistic task-at-hand was to lock the door on the sixth floor men’s room. The reason for this, suffice to say, is because various interpersonal physical engagements between at least two men at a time were known to occur in the stalls in this particular men’s room, for some reason usually later in the afternoons. Customers and employees would see or hear of these activities and the complaints would make their way to the security department. Somehow, this men’s room was well known as a meeting place for similarly minded people to engage in certain acts. I was told the location was even publicized in an underground Philadelphia publication as a potential hook-up spot, or whatever contemporary jargon was assigned to this form of meeting back then. It was thusly determined that it made the most sense to simply lock the door after certain times each day, once it was unoccupied, of course. I was relatively diligent about doing it, except for one particular Saturday afternoon, during the late spring of 1976. I did not perform my door-locking task on that particular afternoon, May 22. I was following a potential shoplifter around in some other part of the store. He eventually left the premises without stealing anything. That happened a lot, of course, and this day was not unusual in that regard. Sometime that day after this potential thief exited the store, around 4:00 or so, I received an urgent call on my pager’s mini-speaker that there was a shooting in the sixth floor men’s room and I should proceed there immediately. There was only one public men’s room on the sixth floor, so I knew where to go. As I was double-stepping upward bound on the store’s escalators, one floor at a time, dread descended upon me. This was the one day I did not secure the door, as was our daily protocol, and now this. Damn! When I arrived at the sixth floor men’s room, within one minute of the original call, I saw that the door was propped open and there were people talking loudly and excitedly around it. One of the employees there recognized me and pointed for me to go in to the bathroom. On my way in, he told me in what can be best described as an unsure and shaky voice, “I think a man has been shot in there.” Damn again! I entered the men’s room. My training at the time, or shall I say lack of training, didn’t much tell me what to do next. In fact, it was my prior training from another job in my recent past that may have helped the most in this situation. I walked into the relatively small men’s room, and there half-in and half-out of one of the stalls was a man in business attire, probably in his 50s, lying face-up on the floor, on top of a rapidly expanding pool of blood. I yelled out for someone to call the rescue squad and the police, although I believe that had already been done. I took some paper towels, designed for water absorption, not blood, and nonetheless pressed them onto the spot on the man’s cheek from where the blood seemed to be oozing. I tried to talk to him at the same time. He was unresponsive. All I could do was what I learned in the first aid portion of my Red Cross senior life-saving course from a few years before. That was to apply direct pressure to his wound. I was hoping, for his sake, it was his only wound. I again tried to ask him what happened, but with no verbal response at all from him, only strained breathing. He WAS breathing though. Thank goodness! The rescue squad appeared about five minutes after I had arrived there, followed by some uniformed police officers. I gladly got out of the way and allowed them to take over the scene. The wounded man was eventually taken on a stretcher by elevator down to an awaiting ambulance on the street. The police interviewed me and other customers and employees who were in the area at the time of the shooting. I later learned that there were apparently two men in the bathroom and a loud bang was heard. Afterwards, a man was seen running from the area and to the down escalator. There were two separate sets of up and down escalators at S&C, in two separate parts of the store. I ran up one toward the sixth floor men’s room, but it seems the shooting suspect ran down the other. When the next person entered the men’s room, the victim was observed on the floor, bleeding profusely. He exited quickly and told a store employee who then called security. In the meantime, one of the assistant security managers, Bob Greer, happened to see a guy running at full speed down the other escalator onto the first floor. As Bob had heard of the 6th floor shooting the same time as me, he followed the guy, who was still moving quickly, into the Gimble’s department store across the street. While there, he saw him put a gun into his pocket. Because of this Bob detained him on the scene with the help of another store detective. Upon being searched, the wallet of the men’s room shooting victim was found on the suspect. The robbery and attempted homicide suspect was eventually turned over to Philadelphia police officers who then formally arrested him. In my follow-up talks with the police detective assigned to investigate the attempted homicide, I learned that the shooting victim did not die as a result of his wounds….
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