Connor Joseph and Gavin Suel
Gavin Suel heard gunfire, exploding grenades and screams before a terrorist took aim at Suel and began shooting. At StoryCorps, the Texas A&M student describes how he, his parents and his four siblings all lived through a terror attack in a Kenyan shopping mall.
- [Gavin] I was in a mall with my family, and we were shopping, and my mom and my four younger siblings were downstairs at this mall. And this was in the capital city in Nairobi, and it's a three-story mall. I was on the second floor with my dad while they were on the first floor. All of the sudden, I heard this loud rattling noise. I had no idea what was going on, and I kinda looked around, and everyone also was, what's going on? And then from the bottom floor, we started to hear screams and stuff. All of a sudden I recognize the sound, actually believe it or not from movies, the sound of gun fire and grenades going off. So the way this three-story mall was shaped was kind of like a donut stacked on top of each other. So you could see down into the middle of the mall from the second floor, and I saw people were running and falling over, and tripping over themselves. And the first thing in my mind is I gotta make sure that my family's safe, 'cause they're down there. So I'm on the down escalator, that's when I see the first guy come around the corner, and we learned later that these are terrorists. He rounds the corner, and he's shooting everything he can. Blasts are shattering everywhere. He's right next to the restaurant that my family was supposed to be in, and also that restaurant, I could tell from the vibration and the sound that was kind of where the first grenade went off. But this guy saw me, and he started shooting at me. I was on a escalator with the glass paneling on the side, and I could see the glass was shattering on its way up to me. So I turned around and took off as fast as I could up the down escalator. How many times have I had this dream where I'm getting chased by a monster, and I cannot run fast enough to get away. So I'm running up the down escalator as fast as I can, I'm just not moving that fast, but I ended up making it up to the top and getting safe. So me and my dad ended up taking shelter. After a while of hiding in the store, everything kind of calmed down after that first initial attack, and we were able to get a hold of my mom through text message, and she said she's fine and the rest of my family is fine. They're hiding downstairs in a storage locker. Long story short, after about five hours of hiding in the back of this store, and praying that we'd be okay, and actually, believe it or not, checking Twitter feeds to know what's going on. It was an Israeli owned mall, so the Israeli military special forces came in and escorted us out in a barrage of gunfire and tear gas. It was quite the experience, but we all made it out safe, but there were bodies everywhere, and blood all over the floor. And I remember washing my shoes afterwards to try to get the blood off, and taking little bits of glass out of the cuffs of my jeans. And so we got back to my house that night, my parents were trying to get a feel for how their kids were doing. And my youngest three siblings, they were, I guess, six, eight, and 10. We kind of asked them, so did you see anything that made you uncomfortable or scared, and they were like, no we didn't see anything. So they have no memory of seeing any of the bodies or anything like that, and my family says they think that was God protecting them. And yeah, we all went to counseling and everything afterward to make sure we're all okay. We all made it out okay, but not everyone can say the same. So that was definitely the wildest experience in Kenya, probably of my life actually. And so I was really worried that when I came to A&M, I would be kind of an outcast, or I wouldn't be able to assimilate. So I went to Fish Camp two weeks after I got back from Africa. I had no idea what to expect, I heard it was a crazy time and a really fun time. So I got there and people were jumping around in tutus and dyed hair and crazy piercings. And I was like, what the heck is going on? And as soon as I got out of my car, I was thrown into this environment and adopted by the Aggie family, and accepted for who I was. That was a huge turning point in my mentality coming here to America. So I was like, A&M is not just a normal place. People here really are different. I was so excited, and it kind of revamped that mentality, like alright, I'm gonna make the most of my time here.