CLEVELAND — A witness to the Cleveland mass shooting that injured nine people downtown in the Warehouse District early Sunday morning is sharing his terrifying experience hiding for cover as bullets rang out.
3News caught up with Chris Messina, president of Cleveland steel mill equipment manufacturer Rad-Con. He was on West 6th Street with some clients when the gunman began to fire, and says one of his clients actually got shot in the leg.
"The first shots, everybody's, like, frozen," Messina described. "There's this second or two where you don't know what's really happening. You're trying to process it. And then everybody does their own thing, whether it was getting on the ground, crawling."
Messina says all he could hear was screaming everywhere as people ran and hid. The scary incident began at about 2:30 a.m., and nine people would be hit by bullets as the gunman aimed shots at the crowd on the sidewalk.
Messina told WKYC he was leaving the Barley House with some clients from Poland, who had just arrived in the United States several hours earlier. He said their night of fun at the bar and welcome to America was absolutely ruined.
"The shooting stopped abruptly, and people were still screaming, crawling, and going all over the place," Messina continued. "That kind of died down, and then the groaning starts, and there's the people that are wounded that are on the sidewalk. And then everybody starts coming out slowly to make sure it was safe."
Then, he discovered one his Polish business clients had been hit.
"One of the guys with us noticed a hole in his jeans, literally, and then [said], 'Oh, I'm bleeding,'" Messina recalled. "There was a lot of blood."
Messina said his 39-year-old client wants to remain unnamed, but confirmed he had been grazed on the thigh. They took him to a MetroHealth Medical Center, where he was treated and released in a few hours.
"He's just a very lucky guy," Messina said of the man.
On Tuesday, 3News asked the Cleveland Division of Police for the latest numbers comparing gun violence from this year to last, and they sent us some data charts which included these highlights:
- From Jan. 1 through July 8, 2022, there were 630 shootings, according to police. Over the same period this year, there have been 708 shootings, an increase of about 12%.
- As for homicides with a firearm, there has been an increase of just over 30%, with 65 killed by a gun from Jan. 1 to July 8, 2022, and 85 over the same period in 2023.
As for the search for the suspect in Sunday's mass shooting, Cleveland officials announced late Tuesday afternoon they had arrested 25-year-old Jaylon Jennings after searching for him for two days. Cleveland Mayor Justin Bibb, Police Chief Wayne Drummond, and Chief Deputy U.S. Marshal Brian Fitzgibbon said Jennings was caught at a home in Lorain around 3:45 p.m. after officials obtained an arrest warrant.