‘When I heard the gunshots, I hid’: 10-year-old discovered bullet wound at home after Kansas City Chiefs parade

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Ten-year-old Samuel Arellano kept telling his family he’d been hit after shots rang out Wednesday near Kansas City’s Union Station. He’d come to the parade with his grandfather, aunt and uncle, all of them massive Kansas City Chiefs fans, and they’d been reveling in the day and their Chiefs jerseys.

Samuel was particularly thrilled to see the players in person, addressing the crowd from microphones at the Union Station rally; Patrick Mahomes is his favourite.

Soon, though, the elation of the day was marred by gunshots – and Samuel felt a biting pain under his arm as training from the active shooter drills at school kicked in.

“When I heard the gunshots, I hid,” he told The Independent Thursday morning. “I fell to the ground and then hid behind a trashcan.”

His grandfather and uncle were close to him, and they soon made their way to hide under a trailer with several other people.

“Everybody was running, losing their shoes, losing their clothes,” Samuel said.

Then, once it seemed clear, Samuel and his family fled with everyone else in panic and shock, racing the 15 minutes back to their homes in the Turner neighborhood, where Samuel, his parents and extended family live next door to each other. No one could find any blood on the ten-year-old, and they didn’t see anything when he first lifted up his shirt, attributing the pain to bruises from the chaos.

When he continued complaining and they lifted the Chiefs jersey higher, however, they saw a gaping wound on his right side, under his armpit.

“He kept saying that he’d been hit, but at the same time, I feel like he himself didn’t believe it ... in that mind of shock,” his aunt, Eunice Salas, told The Independent. “Everyone was trying to comfort him, but at the same time, he was calm too.”

She added: “We feel like it was a miracle, too, because he was not bleeding. He has the wound, but there was no blood or nothing running” down his body.

Samuel’s father was already on the phone with 911, and first responders arrived within minutes to whisk Samuel to Mercy Children’s Hospital. There, doctors “took some parts of the bullet out” and told Samuel’s family the injury had been within centimeters of his lung, his aunt told The Independent.

“They said that thank God that the bullet didn’t go in enough to cause any [further] damage,” said Ms Salas, 25, the aunt who’d attended the parade with Samuel and the others. The family patriarch and uber Chiefs fan is a regular parade-goer, she said, and this had been Samuel’s second year tagging along.

Ms Salas had become separated from her family and was on the other side of Union Station when the shooting started.

“It was chaotic,” she said, because no one was sure whether “it was fireworks, shooting or they were just doing it for the event. We didn’t know what was going on.”

Most people fled from the area “without even knowing what exactly was going on until we got service on our phones relaying that there was an active shooter,” she said.

On Thursday, the Salas and Arellano families were supporting each other after most had been “in shock” after the shooting, Ms Salas said.

Samuel, the day after sustaining a bullet wound, felt “kind of mad.”

But his family wanted to tell their story because they were horrified that what should have been a “great experience,” according to Samuel, had been marred by gun violence.

“We want to raise awareness,” Ms Salas said. “We feel like a lot of people obviously feel for us, and there’s a lot of people out there now, like, ‘It’s just a shooting,’ No. No. This was tragic. And I feel like people need to know that.”

Samuel’s mother, Aby Arellano, expressed condolences to the family of Lisa Lopez-Galvan, the popular 44-year-old local radio DJ killed in the shooting, which “hurts us and makes us very sad.”

“We are devastated by the violence that occurred yesterday, what should have been a day of celebration and unity for our city,” she told The Independent in Spanish. “I ask for prayers for all the families affected.”