fired. More screams pierced the air. Then silence. He watched as the blurry figure in front of him collapsed. Darion had taken a shot to the head and joined his victims who lay dead and dying on the bloody tile floor. The boy never knew what hit him. After some confused commotion and tears the room went silent, as people clung to one another sobbing softly. Patterson stumbled forward and fell face-first to the ground right at the feet of the shooter. The emergency responder sirens outside grew deafening. Police surrounded the building. Patrons remained low to the ground, aghast in their hiding spots. Patterson felt himself drifting. The pain became less intense, and soon everything went black.
Fallout When Detective Harper entered the scene, he hadn’t ever seen anything quite like it in his thirty years with the Richmond PD. Eight people lay dead in the diner. Three cooks. One manager. And four patrons. The police quickly herded everyone out of the diner and to safety. Paramedics were quickly on the scene and overwhelmed by the carnage. Richmond hadn’t experienced a mass shooting of such size in recent memory, or probably ever. Every casualty was pronounced dead on site except for one man with shaggy gray hair and an FBI badge affixed to his belt. He had a steady pulse and was breathing slowly, but had lost a lot of blood. Identified as Agent Josh Patterson, he was promptly taken to an ambulance and rushed to the emergency room. The perpetrator was a young man wearing a camouflaged bulletproof vest. “He should have been wearing a helmet too. Eh, Detective?” one of the officers said to Harper. Harper scratched his scruffy face and knelt down to recover a small GoPro camera amidst a bag of hundreds of rounds of ammo. He was astonished that the boy had killed only eight. The presence of a lone FBI agent only complicated the situation more. What had he been doing there? Eyewitness reports of a brief firefight outside before the massacre only piqued his curiosity. A frenzy of reporters and news cameras had flooded the scene outside, held at bay by tight-lipped crowd control officers. Detective Harper noticed that Darion had failed to upload his video in time. After recovering the busted-up GoPro, he viewed the recording and was met with gruesome scenes of the carnage—death captured in real time. Harper placed it in a sealed evidence bag to be transported to the evidence room with everything else. The detective did a Hail Mary and then tried to get some ID on the shooter. Nothing on the scene directly linked him to a terrorist network. He had no identification on him. Suddenly, Harper heard on his radio that another man, who resembled the diner gunman, had been hit by a truck, not far from the diner. *** Craig tried his best to maintain control of the crash site. He called Patterson repeatedly but only got voicemail instead. A sick feeling brewed in his stomach as he heard sirens blare from a few blocks over. Police were everywhere on the street around him. Paramedics had the driver of the truck—an unconscious white-haired man—on a wheeled stretcher and fitted into a neck-and-shoulder brace. As they pushed him to the ambulance, one EMT held an oxygen pump over the man’s face and pumped intermittently. Rasheed lay in the road unconscious among broken pieces of the truck’s front end and a backpack full of pipe bombs. It was a surreal scene, the second time Craig found himself in the middle of the street amid destruction and chaos in a matter of days. The tide seemed to be turning against him. He forbade investigators to touch the pipe bombs and demanded that the paramedics handle Rasheed with the utmost care. If he died, Craig didn’t know where he would start. “That man is under the custody of the FBI.” He looked to some nearby police. “I want you to escort the ambulance to the hospital and keep guards posted around his room.” He tried Patterson’s cell phone again and again and then pulled