Tops survivor pulled people into cooler to hide during shooting: 'This has changed me'

That changed after May 14, the day the store was targeted by a racist shooter because of its largely Black staff and patrons. 

Steverson said he hid in a cooler in the store and herded a few other people in with him, all of whom survived. In the week since, as the community mourns 10 dead, he has learned the value of that store and his own value as well.

That day, Steverson, 28, was scheduled to work 9 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Around noon, he said, he was in the back kitchen cooking fried chicken when he saw a young white guy near the deli chatting up customers.

“There was something weird about him,” Steverson recalled. “He seemed like he was pretty intelligent, making conversation just to see what was going on, but it just seemed really weird.”

He now thinks it may have been the shooter. There are no other reports that the killer was in the store earlier on Saturday, but there are reports he was there Friday.

Around 2:30 p.m., a man wearing body armor and a helmet came in shooting an AR-15 semiautomatic rifle, killing 10 and wounding three.

Steverson thought he heard pallets falling or someone accidentally knocking items off a shelf. “Then it stopped and started again.”

“But it kept going,” he said. “So me and (a co-worker) both got down and backed out of the deli counter into the back room. And that’s when other customers started coming, running and screaming toward us.”

Steverson rushed them into a walk-in cooler saying, “Get in the cooler! We can hide in the cooler!” They huddled there as the shots grew louder, he said.

“One lady was panicking real bad, and I didn’t know that the person she had come with was deceased already, she saw the person she had come with die,” he said.

As the shots grew closer, “I thought, 'He’s coming back here, I gotta get us out of here."

The store’s rear emergency exit wasn’t far from the cooler.

He said he does not know how many people ran with him for the exit, but they all made it out.

He ran with his co-worker up the street, ducked behind a house, then called his manager Angie, a mother of three young kids, who was just arriving at the store, and told her, "Don't come in, there’s an active shooter in the store."

Steverson has five kids. The youngest, Caiden, is 3.

Since the shooting, Steverson has been coming daily to a Tops support group at the Frank E. Merriweather library. It’s on a busy corner at Jefferson and East Utica Street, where World Central Kitchen and others have been providing meals and services to the community.

The first day he went there, a co-worker named Stacy who had hid with him in the cooler said, ‘You saved me,’ ” he said. “I was like, ‘It’s all a blur.’ ”

Someone else texted him the video the shooter made during his rampage. He watched it.

"Seeing people get shot and bleeding like that, compared to seeing it on TV, and knowing that this is real, that’s what’s been causing me to hurt every day. It’s causing a pain in my heart and it feels like I’m having an asthma attack, but I’m not.”

It helps to see his co-workers. He has bonded with Angie and another survivor, Jerome Bridges, and made new friends including a local World Central Kitchen volunteer, Lauren Celenza. After he told her his story, she cried for days. “He’s a hero,” she said.

Steverson said interacting with people is helping him heal. “This has changed me and made me look at stuff a lot different."