Walking to the door, Dr. Bowman saw a woman rushing in and shouting, “They shot her. They shot Congresswoman Giffords.”
“I stepped out and stood behind a pillar until no more gunshots,” he says. “They’d actually already taken down the shooter as soon as he ran out of bullets. I looked around the corner to the carnage, as you’d expect, with Congresswoman Giffords the first person I saw right at the head of the line near the front door.
“Quite frankly, I stepped over people who were no longer with us to get to her. I got her turned around and moved off to the window; she wasn’t breathing real well. I worked on her airway, cleaning her airway with the young man [Rep. Giffords’ intern, Daniel Hernandez], who then held her for the next 15 to 20 minutes until the paramedics got her ready to go to the hospital.”
From that moment, Dr. Bowman says his training and instincts took over. More important, he went into field-triage mode, “which means you can’t do anything for that one. Can’t do anything there, this one is breathing and talking, not bleeding bad, good; still breathing, good, stay right there, I will be back. You go all the way up the line from person to person, seeing who you can and can’t help.
“The problem with field triage is that you really can’t stop and do a lot, like CPR, because then the rest of the people don’t have anybody looking at them. So you just keep moving,” he explains.
He says that while it was only minutes from the first gunshot to the time police arrived and secured the scene to the time paramedics were allowed to assist with the injured, it seemed like hours. Additionally, in his haste to help, Dr. Bowman had lost track of Nancy.
“I looked back and she was not there,” he says, adding she’d been swept to the back of the grocery store. “I kept working and I looked back and she had pushed [aside] the 17-year-old sacker who was acting as a security guard. … She came outside and started doing CPR on the first person she saw. I got up the line and there was a doctor doing CPR on the young girl [Christina-Taylor Green]. He was in the parking lot when the shots rang out; he threw his wife in the car and ran up to the little girl.”
Instinct and Autopilot
In a little more than 10 seconds, the gunman had fired more than 30 rounds and killed or injured nearly 20 people.
After he’d checked on all of the wounded, Dr. Bowman says he came upon four people holding the suspected shooter down. “One of them, I didn’t know it, was one of my colleagues, Dr. Stephen Rayle,” Dr. Bowman says. “I said, ‘Hold him, and I will send the first officer over here.’ ”
From there, Dr. Bowman says, he went back up the line of injured, checking for breathing sounds and bleeding, making sure every injured person was being attended to.
“People shot in the leg were holding a hand over a chest wound on the man or woman next to them,” he says. “It was one of those chaotic scenes that you try to make some kind of order to, by deciding who you can help and who you can’t.”
When the first paramedics arrived, Dr. Bowman directed them to Rep. Giffords and the 9-year-old girl. Soon after, there were enough EMTs on scene to attend to each of the victims.