More than 20 calls to 911 provide a record of unfolding heartbreak in Hedingham

Jesse Parrish watched his neighbor Mary Marshall chase her dog Scruff through their Hedingham neighborhood in Raleigh Thursday afternoon, heading toward the Neuse River Greenway Trail.

“I saw Mary run down the hill toward the greenway after her dog,” Parrish, 24, told The News & Observer Friday. “I didn’t see her come back up.”

At 5:21 p.m., a man with a cell phone called 911 from the greenway, telling the operator he had found an unconscious woman along the trail as he rode his bike.

“Oh my God,” he exclaims to the operator. “She’s bleeding.”

“And it’s just one person?” the operator asks.

“Yes ma’am, and her little dog.”

The man had no idea a shooting was taking place when he called. His voice went up several octaves as he reacted to the news.

“What?!”

His call was one of more than 20 made to 911 from the Hedingham neighborhood Thursday afternoon as a shooter left a two-mile crime scene and seven victims, five of whom died before the day was out.

The Raleigh Police Department released the calls — with names redacted and voices distorted — on Friday. Taken together, they are a visceral record of unfolding heartbreak.

The first call came at 5:12 p.m. from a man on Osprey Cove Drive who told them “his buddy was shot.”

The public would later learn that that the victim was 29-year-old Raleigh Police Officer Gabriel Torres.

A Capitol Security employee made the second call about Torres just four minutes later. She was talking to dispatchers when she learned he was an officer.

“He’s an off-duty cop?!” she says to someone nearby. “This is bad.”

She finds Torres’ badge and reads off the number before telling the dispatcher that he’s been shot in the chest.

As officers arrive to help Torres, dispatchers hear on the call about another man who came up to the group and says the shooter is on the trail wearing all camouflage.

Three minutes later another caller pulled up to his home near the intersection of Sahalee Way and Castle Pines Drive to find his neighbor and another woman shot.

“I just got home,” the man says to dispatchers. “I got home when I see a neighbor got shot, they got shot.”

He is overcome by emotion.

“Oh my God, damn.”

He shouts an obscenity loudly into the phone.

Sirens can be heard near the caller and the dispatcher asks if the emergency vehicles stopped. When he says they went down the wrong street the dispatcher tells him there are other victims.

He cusses again.

His grief then comes out in a moan. Another curse and a momentary cry.

More sirens. The man pleads for them to stop at his home.

“Can we get some help?! Help!!”

The other 911 calls released detail the terror happening in the neighborhood as residents witnessed shootings, saw the shooter, suspected they saw the shooter, didn’t know what was happening, wanted answers or feared for their safety.

Residents were directed to call in anything suspicious to dispatchers and that ranged from a man wearing camouflage shorts near the golf course to a man running down a street and a new tenant of an Air B&B.

Some reported hearing shots near their homes.

Others begged for safety checks near their houses.

At 7:17 p.m. a dispatcher provides some relief to one caller that police had eyes on the shooter.

One 911 caller said the suspect was “wearing all camo” and carrying a backpack when he headed toward the Neuse River Greenway Trail, behind the houses on Osprey Cove Drive.

“He looks like he’s like 15,” the caller said.

The first police officers arrived less than five minutes after the man made the call. More than four hours later, police arrested a 15-year-old boy they say shot Torres and six other people, including four others who died. They have not released his name, but sources have confirmed for The News & Observer that the suspect is 15-year-old Austin Thompson, the brother of one of the victims.

Also at 5:12 p.m., a woman called 911 from nearby Sahalee Way to report hearing gunshots and seeing a neighbor outside on the ground. Two minutes into the call, the caller noticed a second person.

“There’s two people,” she said. “There’s somebody laying by the bush, and there’s somebody laying on the porch.”

When a dispatcher asked if she had seen anyone shooting or running, she said no.

“We just heard it,” she said. “We heard the shots, and we heard them screaming. And so we got down because we heard it was a gun. And when it stopped we got up and looked out our window.”