money Man says he's the mystery hero from El Paso Walmart shooting: 'Very good possibility it's him'
EL PASO, Texas – "I am the guy who saved the baby," Lazaro Ponce said in a voicemail to the El Paso Times, part of the USA TODAY Network.
Ponce says he is the mystery hero who helped a baby during the horror of the Aug. 3 mass shooting at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, that left 22 people dead.
The voicemail was followed by a series of telephone calls that culminated in an interview Friday in Memphis, Tennessee.
"It's a very good possibility it's him," El Paso police spokesman Sgt. Enrique Carrillo said. Ponce's claim is unconfirmed but arrangements are being made to interview Ponce in the next few days, Carrillo said.
The 43-year-old transient day laborer said he didn't know El Paso police detectives wanted to speak with him because he and his wife, who are homeless, left El Paso weeks after the massacre.
El Paso Police Department detectives said that Ponce contacted them Tuesday after he was interviewed by the El Paso Times on Friday in Memphis. Police officials have not confirmed Ponce's claims.
The FBI confirmed Wednesday that Ponce has contacted the bureau. A spokesperson said agents in Memphis will interview him.
Ponce said that he is the man in a cellphone video publicized in an El Paso Times story in November. The video shows a man rushing out of the store carrying a baby with blood on its clothes.
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A white supremacist from Allen, Texas, is accused of killing 22 people and wounding more than two dozen others in what law enforcement has described as a domestic terror attack targeting Mexicans.
'It was absolutely terrible'
Ponce and his wife, Crystal Ann Roberts, 36, were at the Walmart when the shooting started, they said.
Ponce was at the McDonald's restaurant inside the store when Roberts stepped outside to smoke a cigarette minutes before the gunfire erupted, they said. He said they bought sodas or a cup of coffee and paid cash.
"This guy started to kill people outside," Ponce said in Spanish. "I heard the gunshots, understand? At first, I thought someone was playing drums or someone had a festival going on outside."
Hearing gunfire by the store entrance, Ponce hid for a moment in the McDonald's but felt that if he stayed there, he would be stuck and the shooter would kill him, Ponce said.
"I didn’t let panic get me," he said. "I ran toward the back doors (of the store), but I remembered my wife, and I ran back to her, thinking (that) this canijo (brat) had killed her outside."
Believing his wife dead, "at that moment I didn’t care. I ran back," he said. He later found his wife with other customers who had escaped outside the store. He then went back into the Walmart.
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The majority of the people shot and killed were at a bank inside the Walmart, Ponce said.
“The mom of the little kid and her husband — he got them inside the bank," Ponce said. "There were people — in the panic, they freeze. They had the opportunity to get out of there. I think they got caught because of the fear.”
The baby's mother was still alive, kind of sitting up, when he got to her, he said, adding that he tried but wasn't able to carry her out.
"I tried to help her and take her out of there," he said. "She tried to get up, but she couldn’t move.
"The baby was on her back. She had (the baby) on her back, on like a backpack. I told her, ‘Let me get this kid in case this (expletive) comes back,’” Ponce said.
Ponce said he ran out of the store carrying the child. "I ran, got out. I told a police officer that I have a kid, I think he is injured because he had blood on his side."
The police officer directed him to ambulances, which had begun to arrive at the chaotic scene. "I ran up a little bridge and took him to an ambulance and the paramedics got him there," Ponce said.
Filled with adrenaline, Ponce said he went back inside to help others in the bloody store filled with the dead and wounded.
"It was terrible. It was absolutely terrible," said Ponce, adding that he helped a man in a wheelchair inside the McDonald's and, with others, helped a woman whom they placed on a flat dolly to get her out of the store.
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An older woman was by the cash registers with a portion of her upper arm dangling after it was nearly shot off, he said. A man, who Ponce suspected was the woman's husband, lay dead on the floor, his head split in two.
"I think the lady was in shock. The lady was thinking about her purse," Ponce recalled.
"She tells me, ‘Give me my purse. My purse, that’s where I have the money.’ I said ‘OK, lady.’ I got her purse and I got her out of there with another person, I think."
Afterward, Ponce said he was outside when he saw a man with a bulletproof vest who Ponce believed was the shooter running toward Cielo Vista Mall before people began running out of the mall.
In the initial chaos, police said they didn't know if there was more than one shooter and if there also was a shooting inside the mall. Police officials later said it was determined there was only one shooter. There was no shooting in the mall.
“I did what I could," Ponce said. "At that moment, I wasn’t thinking of anything. ... The scene there looked like a horror movie. People with their heads blown off. Terrible. Terrible.”
Ponce said he gets nightmares, seeing the dead and the wounded in his dreams.
Before the gunfire began, Ponce's wife said she was smoking by a bench outside the store's garden center.
At the beginning of the attack, Roberts said the gunman shot a woman in the parking lot, then opened fire on a family having a fundraiser outside the entrance and also shot a woman on a bench.
"I didn’t know what to think," Roberts said. "I was in pure shock. At the time, my husband was actually inside that store in McDonald’s when I saw the man go inside."
She said, "I ran right into the beauty center inside Walmart and then ran out the back door where the associates were running out."
Roberts added that she's afraid and doesn't want to testify in court since she saw the gunman.
El Paso Police Department officials have explained that investigators, who have security camera and cellphone video of the scene, are not disclosing the actions the unidentified man might have done because it could hamper confirmation of his deeds.
Police: Walmart hero still unconfirmed
El Paso police are neither confirming nor denying Ponce's account.
The man in the cellphone video shown carrying the baby from the Walmart remains unidentified, Carrillo said last week.
"If and when the person in the photo has been positively identified we will let the public know," Carrillo said in a statement.
"Although there may be similarities in appearance, until such time that he is vetted, we cannot and will not confirm that Mr. Ponce and the yet unidentified person in the video/photo are one (and) the same," Carrillo said.
Homeless in El Paso
Ponce said he was born in San Antonio, Texas, but was raised in Juárez before coming to the U.S. in his early teens, when he went to live with family in the Atlanta area.
Ponce and Roberts met about five years ago in South Carolina. They lived in an apartment in New Orleans before moving to El Paso last year.
He said they frequently visited the Walmart and initially told the El Paso Times that they lived in an apartment behind the store but said he didn't remember on which street. In a follow-up interview, he said that there was no apartment.
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“In reality, we were homeless when all that happened," Ponce said. "We didn’t have a home to stay in. We stayed by Sam’s Club behind a clinic. We had a little camp there.”
The couple ended up in the streets after Ponce got hurt and was unable to work as a laborer for five to six months, he said.
About one or two weeks after the Walmart shooting, he said, they moved to Albuquerque and then Denver, unaware of the publicity about the unknown hero.
They are still homeless, but he has been working as a laborer doing construction, roofing, painting and landscaping in Memphis, he said. They hope to move to Atlanta.
Police note man's lifesaving actions
On Aug. 15, less than two weeks after the shooting, the El Paso Police Department released a Walmart security camera photo of the man taken at a store entrance in an effort to identify him for what police called his lifesaving actions.
Ponce said he didn't know authorities wanted to talk with him, saying that he only found out Jan. 5 when Roberts saw a Nov. 26 El Paso Times online article about the mystery hero while on a Greyhound bus trip from Denver to Memphis.
"I started thinking, ‘I was at the Walmart. I was the one carrying the baby.’ I told my wife. ‘I think I’m the one that they are looking for there,' " Ponce said.
Ponce emailed several photos to the El Paso Times, including ones of his tattoos and a Georgia identification card.
Ponce has a mustache and tattoos on one arm similar to the man in the blurry Walmart photo issued by police.
During an interview in Memphis, Ponce wore a baseball cap with an orange "T," like the one used by the University of Tennessee Volunteers, which differs from the cap in the police photo.
He said that he had a Texas A&M cap at the Walmart but that he no longer has the cap, the shirt or an $8 watch he bought in Downtown El Paso seen in the security camera photo. He added that he had been ill and has lost weight since August.
"I don't have photos of my time in El Paso," he said.
Rolling up his sleeves during an interview at a Taco Bell in Memphis, Ponce explained he got the tattoos in prison when he was a young man.
The face of a growling panther, a cross, a small Nike swoosh and other images mark his left forearm. There is a gap of bare skin between the bottom of the panther and a thorns tattoo circling his wrist.
"Lazaro" in Old English letters is inked down the back of his forearm, with a spiderweb near his elbow. He has no tattoos on his right forearm.
He is not the only person claiming to be the mystery hero.
On Jan. 2, Channel 7-KVIA aired a new separate cellphone video that appears to show, from behind, the unidentified man carrying the baby toward a police officer outside the Walmart.
The man appears to run with a limp. Ponce walks with a limp.
KVIA reported that a mystery man going only by the name "Geronimo" spoke to one of its reporters on three occasions: twice in person and once on the phone.
"Geronimo" twice agreed to an interview but failed to show up at the KVIA studios each time.
Police said that anyone with information on the mystery hero's identity should call the Crimes Against Persons Unit at 915-212-4040.
Ponce said he wishes the best to the families of the victims and the survivors. He called the shooter a coward who went after unarmed innocents yet quickly surrendered when faced by armed police officers.
"I want to add that I think this individual (the shooter) should get the death penalty," he said. "He doesn't deserve to be breathing."
Follow reporter Daniel Borunda on Twitter @BorundaDaniel
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This article originally appeared on El Paso Times: El Paso Walmart mass shooting: Lazaro Ponce says he's mystery hero
