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GILLIAN FLACCUS

Mon, August 29, 2022 at 12:53 AM

PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) — A Safeway employee who previously served in the U.S. Army for two decades attacked a gunman in the produce section of the Bend, Oregon, supermarket, police said Monday, possibly preventing more casualties from a shooting that left the employee and one other person dead.

Police hailed the employee, 66-year-old Donald Ray Surrett Jr., of Bend, as a hero and said his actions may have saved shoppers at the store in the high-desert city ringed by mountains in the central part of the state. Customer Glenn Edward Bennett, 84, of Bend, was also killed Sunday evening, police spokeswoman Sheila Miller said.

“Mr. Surrett engaged with the shooter, attempted to disarm him and may very well have prevented further deaths. Mr. Surrett acted heroically turning this terrible event,” Miller said at a news conference as she struggled against tears.

Police said Monday the shooter died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound; his body was found by police near an AR-15-style weapon and a shotgun. Police identified the gunman as Ethan Blair Miller, 20, of Bend.

The gunman lived in an apartment complex behind The Forum Shopping Center. Witnesses said he began shooting Sunday evening as soon as he left the complex and continued firing as he entered the shopping complex's parking lot and then went into the Safeway.

Bennett was killed at the store's entrance, police said, and the shooter then moved through the aisles “spraying shots” from the assault rifle until Surrett confronted him. The entire incident — from the first 911 calls to officers discovering the suspect dead in the store — unfolded in four minutes, Miller said.

Police entered the supermarket from the front and rear as shots were still being fired.

Debora Jean Surrett, the ex-wife of the Safeway employee killed in the attack, told The Associated Press in a phone interview that Surrett served in the Army for 20 years as a combat engineer.

He wasn’t deployed to active combat zones, but during the 20 years they were married from 1975 to 1995, they were stationed in Germany three times and lived on military bases across the U.S.

“They’re trained to be the first ones to go into war and the last ones to come home,” she told the AP.

Bend Mayor Pro Tem Anthony Broadman said Americans “need to guard against the cynicism of thinking of these attacks on order and peace as regular, unavoidable things. I won’t accept that.”

“We know that in the face of the kind of chaos that we saw last night, we had brave first responders, brave citizens, people willing to stand up for their neighbors,” he added.

Authorities later found three Molotov cocktails and a sawed-off shotgun in the shooter's car. The Oregon State Police bomb squad was called in to sweep the store, the car and the suspect's apartment for explosives, authorities said, forcing the evacuation of eight surrounding apartments on Monday morning.