Mesa shooting: Fear, relief and mystery on gunman's path

Isaac Martinez was starting his morning shift at the culinary school restaurant.

Andrew Watzek was working on draining a pool at an apartment complex.

Marcus Butler was picking up a test kit for his own pool maintenance work. He could hear kids in the complex laughing on the playground.

It was a Wednesday morning, and Mesa was on its way to work, to school, to the day ahead. Some people had been up for hours. Some were still asleep. A little before 9 in the morning, a man entered the parking lot of the pink-toned, low-slung Tri-City Inn on Main Street. He stood in the doorway of Room 102, raised a gun and started shooting. He hit three people. One man inside Room 102, David Williams, fell dead.

Mesa police say the gunman was Ryan Elliott Giroux, 41, who was charged Thursday with a raft of 35 allegations, ranging from murder to kidnapping.

The spark that triggered those first shots in the doorway of Room 102 remains unclear. The gunman fled, bullets still flying, and terror began to spread along a two-mile stretch of the city.

Isaac Martinez, 20 — lanky and easy-going, with a cloud of curly, jet-black hair — had enrolled in the one-year culinary certificate program at the the East Valley Institute of Technology in August. Since then, he had settled into a groove rotating through various posts at Bistro 13, the restaurant run by culinary students.

He admits that he was adrift as a younger student, more prone to "messing around all the time" than studying. His outlook changed in high school after he transferred to Riverview, an alternative school in the Mesa Public Schools district.

"Everything really turned around for me over there at that high school," he said. "I got some teachers who were really interested in personal lives of students and that's when I really started doing something different."

On Wednesday morning, his job was to prepare the meat for the day's lunch rush, and so Martinez had spent most of the first hour of his shift inside cold storage, shivering in his chef's whites as he tenderized and defatted at least 36 chicken breasts. After finishing a case, he stepped outside the walk-in freezer to warm up.

That was when he spotted a man talking to his classmate at the register. When she walked away, the man motioned toward Martinez.

At first, Martinez thought the man was a regular customer. Bistro 13 is right across Main Street from a string of motels, he explained, and guys like this one — tattooed and laconic — were not uncommon at the restaurant.

"There's a bunch of people that come in and just sit for a couple hours with a cup of water," Martinez said. "They just look like different characters, you know? You just don't really question the people that come in. He did look like a different character, but I wasn't expecting anything."

The man asked if Martinez had driven to the restaurant. When Martinez said yes, the man began demanding his keys.

"I told him, 'no,'" Martinez said. Immediately, he said the man showed him his gun and cocked it. "He said, 'No, you're gonna give me your keys.'"

Martinez stepped back and began turning around. His classmates were in the back kitchen, he said, in positions that were not quite visible to the main dining room.

"That's when I yelled to everyone, 'Step back and get down!'" Martinez said. As he was pivoting, he felt a violent force hitting his right shoulder from behind. "It felt like just a force of air just knocking me down," he said. "But I immediately knew what that meant."

Martinez would later learn a bullet had traveled through his right shoulder, narrowly missing his arteries and shoulder blade. At the time, though, he said sheer adrenaline must have overpowered any pain. Martinez immediately stood back up and ran straight through the kitchen and through a back exit. As he came back around the west side of the restaurant, Martinez saw the gunman peeling out of the parking lot in a car that belonged to one of his instructors.

He stepped back inside. His classmates were OK. By now, Martinez was aware he was bleeding and noticed ambulances and police cars clustered down Main Street at the Tri-Ciy Inn. He began running toward them for help.

"It was easy for me to see and understand that I wasn't… critically hurt or anything," he said. He had full function of his arm. He was moving. He was breathing. "I knew I wasn't that damaged and so that's when I was just kind of like, I got shot. I'm OK. I'm over it."

As he hustled over to the emergency crews, he fumbled with his camera phone and took a short video selfie. He opened his Snapchat app and posted it to the social media site with a note: "I just got shot..."

According to police, the gunman drove the stolen car south, pulling into an apartment complex on Longmore Street.

That's where Andrew Watzek was working. He's a project supervisor for a pool company. The apartment complex was renovating the pool and Watzek was there on Wednesday to drain it.

The man emerged from the stolen car and demanded the keys to Watzek's truck.

"By the time I realized what was happening, I was already looking down a gun barrel," Watzek said.

Watzek said he told the man that the keys were already in the truck.

That was true — but Watzek said he didn't tell him that the keys were in the console, not in the ignition.

When the gunman couldn't find the keys, he demanded Watzek's wallet and pocket knife, then left in the stolen car.

"Why he didn't shoot me is beyond me," Watzek said Thursday during a phone interview. "He shot everybody else."

The gunman, police said, would make his way to the nearby Sorrento Apartments, force his way into one home and shoot a man, Donovan Worker, who had been asleep and emerged to the commotion.

Then he would flee across the street to a complex called Villetta, where Marcus Butler was already at work.

Butler is the youngest of the maintenance crew at Villetta Apartments. He's also the boss.

Butler's 25. His impish smile, lean frame and penchant for jokes makes him seem like a teenager.

But he takes his work seriously. And residents who call on their maintenance man to repair everything from a leaky faucet to a busted lock know they can depend on him.

"I like fixing things," Butler said.

Marcus's wife works out of state so he lives with his mom and dad in Mesa. He had to be to work by 7 a.m. Wednesday, and he wasn't keeping tabs on the news once he got there.

He didn't know a gunman had started a deadly spree within a few miles of Villetta Apartments. And he couldn't have fathomed that he would be the sixth and final person shot.

At Villetta, Butler was walking to the maintenance shop to pick up a test kit for the pools. It was overcast but warm. Nearby schools were on spring break so there were children laughing and playing on the complex's playground. The kids at Villetta love Butler because he always takes time to joke around a bit.

On Wednesday, Butler said "Hi" and smiled at residents, as he walked through the complex on his way to the shop on the east end of the complex next to a parking lot.

He saw another crew member, Luis Lopez, walking past the pool close behind another man.

"The guy said, 'What's up?'" Butler recalled.

"I said, 'What's up.' Then, he pointed a gun. I thought it was a toy gun. He shot me, five or six times. I didn't even know I was hit. I looked at my arm, 'Oh, I'm bleeding everywhere."

Butler was hit with four bullets. A bullet hole about the size of a nickel left an indentation on the maintenance shop door.

One bullet went through his back, missing his spine. Another went through a v-shaped muscle in his stomach. Another grazed him. And another went through his arm.

"I just felt a burning," Marcus Butler said. "Luis ran. I'm just glad it was me and not Luis."

The spree would come to an end almost as suddenly as it began. A block away, police said, the gunman would break into a vacant apartment, then emerge. Tactical teams would subdue him with a stun gun.

By Thursday morning, Giroux was charged and sitting in Fourth Avenue Jail.

On the same morning, Isaac Martinez made his way back to class at EVIT, a bandage across his right shoulder. He spent the afternoon resting. It was difficult for him to raise his right arm, but he was confident he would be "better in no time."

News of his Snapchat post had gone viral the night before — so much that the man now famous for using his phone decided to ignore it for most of the next day. It was all a bit overwhelming, he said.

Still, Martinez said it was natural to document the situation because by then he knew the shooter was gone, his classmates were OK and he had not been seriously injured.

"It's kind of like, you know you're stable and you're just shocked you got away," he said Thursday afternoon outside his Mesa apartment. Martinez held up his hands and pretended to take a selfie, laughing.

"I didn't have nothing else to do," he said. "Might as well make it a better situation, right?"

On Thursday afternoon, Andrew Watzek was spending time on the phone, canceling his credit cards and ordering a new driver's license. Watzek said he handed his wallet to Giroux and isn't sure what became of its contents. His cellphone was in his other pocket.

The thought of how close he came to dying kept him up most of Wednesday night.

The gunman had "his finger on the trigger, but he didn't pull it," he said. "I kept seeing the rage in that man's eyes."

Watzek has written two self-published novels that involve gun battles in the Old West, but said this was as close as he had come to a modern-day outlaw.

"These boys don't play by the same rules," he said.

On Thursday evening, Marcus Butler examined his arm from his hospital room. His fingers were still numb. Doctors said he will need physical therapy to recover use of his hand.

Marcus and his wife, Lisa Conway, 25, were high-school sweethearts. They've been together since they were 16 and got married at 18. She flew in from Michigan when she found out her husband was shot.

She broke down thinking about the shooting. Butler reached for her hand.

"It's OK," he said. "I'm alive."

"I think it's a miracle," said his mother, Mary Butler, 51. "It was God. He shot Marcus six times from 10 feet away and Marcus is fine."

Walter Butler, 51, said he had one goal when police called him that morning and told him his son had been shot.

"They said he was OK, but I needed to see him. I had to see him with my own eyes," he said. "I don't want to think of that man (Giroux). I told people not to send me pictures. I don't want to see him."

Mary is grateful.

"My son is alive," she said. "I'm sorry for the one life we lost."

The sun had just set behind booming cumulonimbus clouds Thursday evening when Veronica Ehrig walked with her sister toward the Tri-City Inn's entrance sign and a memorial to her boyfriend David Williams. Two children walked with them.

About 15 people joined Ehrig at the memorial where she stood silent for moment before lighting a candle and placing it in front of the shrine. They were there to remember Williams, the victim who remained mostly a mystery to the rest of the world the day after he died.

Ehrig, 28, had already removed some of her boyfriend's items from the room earlier that day — a skateboard and a large suitcase.

Police said Williams' mother, Lydia Nielson, also was shot in the room, and a friend, Jessica Burgess, also was wounded. But no one at the makeshift vigil could say just how the shooting started, and why.

"(Williams) was a very good man," Ehrig's sister Tanya said through tears as people stood near the small wooden cross and multicolored flowers that had slowly grown throughout the afternoon "He loved my sister Veronica so much. They got along so well. I don't understand how this person could do this to somebody."

More started to gather at the shrine. A man gave Tanya a $10 bill. But Ehrig remained silent as she slipped from the crowd and walked back to Room 102.

Reporter Richard Ruelas contributed.