8A Saturday, February 22, 2020 ^
The Times, Gainesville, Georgia | gainesvilletimes.com
LOCAL/WORLD
Survivor: German shooter
emptied magazine, left
BY CHRISTOPH NOELTING
Associated Press
HANAU — Piter Minnemann and his
friends were eating when they heard shots
fired outside the door of the snack bar in
Hanau where they had gathered.
Minnemann, 18, recalled that he
had just got his pizza when the first
shots were heard at the Arena Bar.
It was the second site targeted in
Wednesday night’s shooting of nine
people by a German man who had
posted an online rant calling for the
“complete extermination” of many
“races or cultures in our midst.”
“We thought it was a blank gun or
something. We thought nothing of it,”
he said. “Then the man came in, he
fired.”
The gunman shot two people before com
ing into the bar, where “he aimed right
at us — he shot the first one in the head,”
Minnemann said.
A pregnant woman jumped out of the win
dow, he said.
“He came, fired, emptied his magazine,
then everything was quiet, then he walked out
normally,” he recalled. “I opened my eyes, I
saw that I was alive, I was happy. I asked if
people were OK but Edris — I don’t know if
he’s still alive but I think he survived — he
had a hole in his throat and he said, ‘I’ve been
hit, I’ve been hit,’ my other friend Momo was
hit in the shoulder.”
In all, Hanau native Minnemann said he
lost four or five “friends I have known for
years.”
He spoke to The Associated Press next to a
statue of the Brothers Grimm, the collectors
of folk and fairy-tales who hailed from Hanau,
in the town’s main square. That memorial is
now festooned with flowers and candles in
memory of Wednesday night’s victims.
“I still can’t believe it, in some situations
it’s as if nothing happened, but when I see
the people crying, when I see this, then it
becomes true again,... then you see that it is
real,” he said. “But otherwise, I can’t
believe that this happened to us, us
of all people, in the very place where
we are every day, where we chill out
everyday.”
“I thought it was some kind of
gang stuff at first,” Minnemann said.
He recalled that there were 12 or 13
people at the scene at the time of the
shooting. Many others died, he said
— “I was very lucky.”
Another witness of the shooting at
the Arena Bar told Turkey’s Haber television
that he and his friends heard five or six shots
outside before the gunman entered.
“He shot the first people he saw in the
head. A man fell to the floor,” Muhammed
Beyazkender, who was lying in his hospital
bed with a bandaged shoulder, said on Thurs
day. “Then he fired at all of us. I got shot in
the arm while I tried to hide behind the wall. ”
Beyazkender said he lay on the floor on top
of someone, and someone then lay on top of
him, and someone else then on top of him.
“There was a kid underneath me with a
hole in his throat,” he said. “The kid said to
me: ‘my brother, I cannot feel my tongue;
I cannot breathe.’ I said to him, recite the
Kalima Shahadat prayer (from the Quran).
He recited the Kalima Shahadat, he called
on everyone to recite it. There was no other
sound, just the two of us. I didn’t see him
escape or anything.”
Minnemann
Two woman mourn
near a kiosk in
Hanau, Germany
Friday, Feb. 21,
two days after a
43-year-old German
man shot and killed
several people at
several locations in a
Frankfurt suburb on
Wednesday, Feb. 19.
MICHAEL PROBST
Associated Press
Few details on man’s gunshot wound
A 19-year-old Hispanic man received a
gunshot wound to the leg sometime Thurs
day night or early Friday morning in the
vicinity of Lanier Point Park, according to
Gainesville police.
Police had no other details on exactly
where, when or how the incident happened.
Police spokeswoman Cpl. Jessica Van said
the man was not talking to investigators.
Nate McCullough
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