By Rich McKay
(Reuters) -Trey Filter, an avid Kansas City Chiefs fan, was feeling great about the Super Bowl victory rally he was leaving with his family when suddenly shots rang out, he saw people running and he heard them shout, “He’s got a gun! Get him!”
He saw the man everyone seemed to be shouting about and sized up the situation. “I did the math right there and jumped,” the paving company owner, 40, from Wichita, Kansas, said in an interview.
Filter and another Chiefs fan, Paul Contreras, tackled the man who was then detained for questioning by police along with two other people following Wednesday’s deadly shooting outside the downtown landmark Union Station.
The shooting appeared to be the result of a dispute between individuals, police said on Thursday.
The gunfire turned a sun-drenched love fest between the Super Bowl champs and their hometown fans into a horror show. A beloved local radio DJ was killed and 22 other people were wounded. It was Valentine’s Day no less.
Filter said he thought at first he was hearing fireworks. “We didn’t think much of it,” he said. He was feeling it had been a “great day” celebrating the Chiefs 25-22 victory over San Francisco in Sunday’s championship game.
Filter and Contreras told the man they had tackled that “he needed to stay down, until a couple of cops pulled us off him,” Filter said. His wife Casey recovered what they believed was the man’s AK-47 style rifle.
Kansas City Police Chief Stacey Graves said on Thursday that some attendees “physically stopped a person who was believed to be involved in the incident.” Speaking at a press conference, she thanked the people for having “acted bravely.”
She said investigators were reviewing the footage to determine if the individual was one of the people taken into police custody.
Fifteen people had life-threatening wounds, and 11 of those hurt by gunfire or the ensuing pandemonium were children, officials said.
Filter told Reuters that he hadn’t slept much on Wednesday night and that he and his family were “just trying to find out why this happened, like everyone else.”
Contreras, the fan who helped Filter subdue the suspect, told his hometown television station KETV in Omaha, Nebraska, that the man appeared to drop his gun when Contreras tackled him from behind.
“I kinda got him high and the other guy gets him around his waist, and we’re just putting our weight on him, and he’s fighting to get up,” Contreras told the station.
A video shot by Contreras’ daughter Alyssa in the aftermath of the incident showed police officers clustered around a man on the grass next to a concrete barricade, with hundreds of Chiefs fans watching from the other side.
Once police arrived, Contreras said, he barely exchanged words with them. He waited with his three daughters for a few minutes and then headed to their car.
(Reporting by Rich McKay and Brendan O’Brien; Editing by Howard Goller)
