Vancouver Mall victim: 'Daddy, you're bleeding'
PORTLAND, Ore. (KOIN) -- On Halloween, Daniel Martin took his two little girls to the Vancouver Mall for a Trick-or-Treating event with his ex-wife and her boyfriend, Brandon Leyrer.
Both men and the kids were sitting in the food court when gunfire erupted.
"I heard four loud pops and it almost sounded like firecrackers going off. But in my head I was, like, 'What is that? Is that a gun?'" Martin told KOIN 6 News. "I felt something hit my foot and I was, like, 'I just got shot. There's a shooter right behind me.'"
Martin was shot in the foot, Leyrer in the abdomen.
"I had seen the gunman. He was wearing like a Halloween costume with a mask and everything," Martin said, "and I just saw him emptying the rest of his handgun into the body on the floor. And so I know that, like, less than 10 feet away from me is someone who is unloading a gun into a body, and I'm holding my daughters and I'm bleeding from my foot and they're freaking out."
The shooter ran away, and a stranger used their belt as a tourniquet along with a wad of napkins to stop the bleeding on his foot.
"My 5-year-old, like, her first reaction is, like, 'Do we not get any candy? Did we lose the candy?'" Martin said. "And then she sees my foot and goes, 'Daddy, your foot, it's bleeding, Daddy.'"
First responders took both men to the hospital and both were discharged a few hours later. He said the bullets are still lodged in both he and Leyrer.
On Saturday, Vancouver police arrested Travis L. Ward after investigators and a SWAT unit surrounded a home. He surrendered and was booked into the Clark County Jail for booked for murder and assault.
GoFundMe: Support for Vancouver Mall shooting victims
Martin just doesn't understand how something like this could happen.
"My girls are still crying, and I'm just trying to get them to focus on me and not, I'm just kind of desperately hoping that they didn't see the body on the floor," he said.
"What do you say to somebody who decides to walk up to someone else and unload an entire magazine in front of children and around children and not caring about the risk to children, like this was a family event, and he chose to do it."