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| 'I felt him breathe': |
| 'I felt him breathe': escape from the Navy Yard
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| UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
, 20-September-2013
9:41:0 AM |
| The first bang sounded distant and muffled. On the fourth floor, Bertillia Lavern assumed somebody downstairs was setting up for an event and had dropped a folding table.
But when the bangs kept coming, Lavern recognized the sounds.
Years earlier, before taking a civilian office job at Naval Sea Systems headquarters, Lavern was a Navy medical specialist. Known as a corpsman, she'd been on training operations with the Marines. She knew the snap of gunfire.
The 39-year-old hit the ground and scurried under a desk with her supervisor in a nearby cubicle, she said. They stayed there silently as the shots continued.
From that vantage point, the building's open floor plan allowed her to view the fifth floor, where she saw someone moving.
"Get down!" she screamed, emerging from her hiding place.
She remembers her supervisor, Andy Kelly, making the same demand of her. And she remembers a bright flash of light.
"Glass shattered right by my head," she told The Associated Press in a phone interview on Thursday. "It was on the edge of Andy's cubicle."
Lavern's account is the most detailed yet by someone who was inside the Navy Yard when former Navy reservist Aaron Alexis, a contractor who had worked at the Navy Yard for less than a month, shot and killed 12 civilians on Monday before being killed by police.
Lavern said she and Kelly ducked down again and waited for a break in the shooting.
"We realized then we had to get out of the building," she said. "Andy looked around the corner to check that the coast was clear."
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