A mother is speaking out after she thought she was going to lose her life while shopping for art supplies with her 2-year-old daughter at the Jacksonville, Dollar General store where a racially motivated mass shooting occurred.
While speaking with News4Jax, Mercedez Jones explained how she thought it was just a regular day until she suddenly heard gunfire inside the store. “I didn’t care if he shot me, just not my baby, please. The last moments I had with her, she was being bad,” she said. “I didn’t know the nature of the crime at the time. All I [knew] was, ‘I got to get my baby out of here.’ Then he came behind the store, and we saw him. He was like in military clothes, he had like this marine [outfit] on, a bulletproof vest and the biggest gun I have ever seen strapped around his shoulders and he just sat there, he watched us, he could have killed us all.”
“It was three other women, older women that worked there behind that building with me. Everybody else could jump, but I couldn’t. I had a baby. So, therefore, we [were] begging for our lives and I fell begging for mine, blocking my baby with my body and then he was like, ‘If you don’t want me to shoot you, run,’” Jones explained. After she ran away she ended up at a nearby property where police officers showed up to help her.
As we previously reported, Ryan Christopher Palmeter, 21, shot and killed three people at a Dollar General in Jacksonville, Florida, on Saturday, authorities said. All three victims were Black, and the suspect detailed a “disgusting ideology of hate” in writings, according to Jacksonville Sheriff T.K. Waters. “Plainly put, this shooting was racially motivated and he hated Black people,” Waters said of the suspect.
The gunman was armed with an AR-15-style rifle and a handgun and outfitted in a tactical vest when he shot three people — two men and a woman — before turning the gun on himself, according to Waters. No other injuries were reported in the shooting. “This is a dark day in Jacksonville’s history,” Waters said. “As a member of this Jacksonville community, I am sickened by this cowardly shooter’s personal ideology of hate.”
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almeter had authored several manifestos, for his parents, the media and federal agents, detailing his hatred of Black people, police said.
Mr Waters said those manifestos “detailed the shooters disgusting ideology of hate”.
“Finely put: this shooting was racially motivated and he hated black people.”
“The manifesto is, quite frankly… the diary of a madman”, he said. “He knew what he was doing. He was 100% lucid. He knew what he was doing and again, it’s disappointing that anyone would go to these lengths to hurt someone else”.
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