Tops worker tells of hiding in barricaded room from gunman during mass shooting

Bridges was back at the crime scene Thursday morning, looking at the shut-down market from a parking lot next door, talking about what happened to him to anyone who asks.

“I can’t stay away. I’ve been here every day since the shooting,” Bridges told a reporter from The Buffalo News. “I can’t keep myself from coming back. I don’t mind telling the story over and over, because every time I do, it just brings a little bit of relief.”

Bridges added that he’s slept “about eight hours, total” since the mass murder at his workplace Saturday afternoon.

“Every time I close my eyes, all I see is blood and dead bodies, and all I hear is gunfire and people screaming,” Bridges said. “I can’t sleep.”

Bridges, 45, said he has worked more than three years at Tops as a scan coordinator. He goes around the store, making sure every item has the right price code on it.

He said he started a day shift at 10 a.m. Saturday, and it began as a routine workday. Around 2 p.m., he had a brief, friendly conversation with one of the store’s regular customers, 86-year-old Ruth Elizabeth Whitfield, whom he described as “a very nice lady.”

Not long after that, Bridges recalled, he was pricing items near the back of the store when he heard four loud popping sounds from the parking lot. He assumed it was a car backfiring.

“Then, there were people running like crazy, people screaming and I heard rapid fire. … I knew it was gunfire and it was moving closer to where I was,” Bridges said.

He said two store workers ran toward him.

“We were right near the employees’ conference room, I said, ‘Let’s get in there!’ Five customers came running toward us, and we all got into the conference room,” Bridges said. “We locked the door, and there’s a big oak table in there. We pushed it over on its side and moved it next to the door. I told everybody to lay on the floor and be quiet.”

Bridges said he never saw the killer but heard his shots getting closer and closer.

“He fired a few shots through the dairy case, so I knew he had been casing the store. He knew somebody could be hiding back there behind the milk,” Bridges said. “The dairy case was right near where we were hiding. I was afraid he was going to start firing through the wall into the conference room.”

He said his 15-year-old son kept calling Bridges’ cellphone, trying to find out if Bridges was OK. “I couldn’t answer him and I had to silence the phone,” the store worker said. “I was scared the shooter was going to hear my phone and come after us.”

Suddenly, the gunfire stopped. A few minutes later, another store worker named Carl knocked at the door and told Bridges it was all right to come out. “I had to make sure it was really Carl before I opened the door,” Bridges recalled. “The police came and led us out the back door.”

He learned that 10 people were killed, including the kindly Whitfield, to whom he had spoken earlier in the day.

On Sunday, the shaken Bridges saw a picture of accused killer, Payton Gendron, 18, on a news broadcast. He said he immediately recognized Gendron from a brief encounter with him in March, when Gendron – according to police – traveled to Buffalo to scout potential sites for the massacre.

“I remember his face. He was just standing in the back of the store, near the double doors, looking around in a strange way,” Bridges said. “I went over to him and asked if I could help him find anything. He just looked at me and then walked away.”

Bridges has been meeting with a counselor every day since Monday. "The store is providing the counselors for me and a lot of other employees," he said. "I do think it's helping me to deal with it."

Bridges said he is not sure how many days he will keep his vigil at the crime scene. He said he looks forward to the reopening of the store, which he said is known as Tops Store #250.

“I keep telling everyone I know, ‘Jefferson Strong, 250 Strong,’ ” Bridges said. “Nobody is going to come in to Buffalo and destroy our store, or our neighborhood. This is our store, our neighborhood.”