A quick-thinking Trader Joe's staffer rescued his coworkers from the standoff in L.A.
When his Los Angeles Trader Joe's store became the site of a three-hour standoff with police Saturday, an employee named Sean Gerace sprang into action.
After hearing gunshots and screams, Gerace took several of his coworkers to the store's upper level. "I grabbed an emergency ladder, barricaded the hallway, grabbed a weapon, put the ladder out the window, and just tried to get the attention of a SWAT officer," he told a local TV station. Once he got the okay from the police, Gerace helped his group escape the store.
The standoff ended with one woman dead and six people injured. The suspect was being chased by police when he crashed his car outside the store, fired a gun at police pursuing him, and then barricaded himself inside the Trader Joe's.
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The suspect has not been identified, but he was being chased by authorities after critically injuring his grandmother by shooting her seven times. He eventually surrendered to police custody, handcuffing himself for arrest.
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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.
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