Pittsburgh officer wounded in synagogue attack recounts encounter with gunman

Pittsburgh police Officer Daniel Mead was just about to start his 10 a.m. shift in Squirrel Hill on Oct. 27, 2018, when, during roll call, he and his partner heard a report of an active shooter at the Tree of Life synagogue a few blocks away.

They raced out the door. At the synagogue, Stephen Weiss, a member of the Tree of Life congregation who had just escaped the attack unfolding inside, pointed them toward the front of the building where he believed the attacker to be.

“We didn’t hear anything. We didn’t hear no shooting, no nothing,” Mead testified Thursday in federal court.

Mead said he inched around a bend toward the glass doors.

“When I stepped out, there he was,” Mead said. “I seen a man posted up at me with a rifle.”

Robert Bowers was behind the glass 4 feet away.

“He started shooting,” Mead said. “I remember the first bullet came through the glass at me. I felt my hand go up in the air. It was like a rag doll.”

Bowers, 50, of Baldwin is accused of killing 11 people that morning inside the synagogue, which housed Tree of Life-Or L’Simcha, Dor Hadash and New Light congregations. His trial began Tuesday at the federal courthouse in Downtown Pittsburgh.

Bowers does not deny his actions that day.

The government is seeking the death penalty.

On Thursday, Mead spent about 30 minutes on the witness stand, describing what happened outside the synagogue at Wilkins and Shady avenues.

Mead, who has been on disability since the attack and used a wheelchair to get to the witness stand, testified that, when he was shot, he felt the bullet go through his wrist and explode out of the top of his hand.

It was left dangling at his side.

At the same time, he said, he felt burning in his thigh as it was struck with shrapnel.

“I stepped back and just walked away,” Mead said.

He thought he would lose his hand.

As Mead retreated, he said, he kept angrily shouting the same expletive and called on the radio that he’d been shot and needed a medic. Then he told his fellow officers who were arriving on scene to “get down into the (expletive) ballgame where the action’s at.”

When asked by Assistant U.S. Attorney Soo Song why he raced toward the building knowing there was a shooter inside, Mead answered, “It’s what we do, police officers.”

Mead was one of seven witnesses called by the government Thursday, including Audrey Glickman, a member of the Tree of Life congregation.

She regularly led the first part of their service with David Rosenthal, a longtime member of the congregation along with his brother, Cecil Rosenthal. The brothers, who had an intellectual disability, were active participants, with Cecil greeting congregants as they arrived and David singing with Glickman.

“He was always singing — full-throated singing,” she said. “He would come with me to lead the service. David had attached himself to me delightfully.”

As the service moved into Rabbi Jeffrey Myers’ portion of the Mourner’s Prayer, Glickman said, they heard gunfire.

“The echoing of machine gun fire was unmistakable,” she said.

Glickman, 66, said she immediately looked to her companion in the sanctuary, Joseph Charny, and grabbed David to help him escape.

“I took David up toward the door. I was explaining to him we had to go hide and be quiet,” she told the jury.

She said David was upset and didn’t know what was happening. She and Charny tried to head upstairs with him away from the sanctuary.

“We had him up a couple steps, and he ran back into the chapel,” she said.

They couldn’t follow him.

“We could only hope what was going on was not happening in the chapel, and he could get out,” she said.

Glickman said she and Charny ran upstairs and hid inside a room next to the choir loft.

“We had no idea how many people were attacking at that time, so we went up,” she said.

The room they hid in was used for storage for clothing and other items to be donated. It was filled with boxes and full bags.

“We knelt down on the floor and covered up with our prayer shawls so we would look more like those bags of clothing,” Glickman said.

She and Charny, who at the time was 90, spoke quietly while they were on the floor. He told her what he’d seen in the chapel.

“He had stood face to face with a man with a gun. His eyes were blue. His clothes were blue, and he had a long gun,” Glickman said.

Charny had seen Bowers in the aisle next to him.

Glickman and Charny stayed on the floor until they thought it was safe. Glickman texted her son on Charny’s phone to tell him what was happening.

They then went down the stairs and left through the main sanctuary. They both still wore their prayer shawls and carried their prayer books.

On Thursday, Glickman told jurors that Charny died earlier this year.

“I’m sure the whole event took years off his life,” she said. “He really wanted to be here to testify.”

As she concluded her testimony, Glickman pointed out the irony to the jurors of the prayer Myers was reciting when the attack began.

“We were in the middle of the prayer for people who passed away, and people were murdered in front of us,” she said. “Every time I’ve finished that prayer after that, I consider it a milestone.”

Those killed in the attack were Richard Gottfried, 65; Bernice Simon, 84, and her husband, Sylvan, 86; David Rosenthal, 54, and Cecil Rosenthal, 59; Dan Stein, 71; Irving Younger, 69; Dr. Jerry Rabinowitz, 66; Joyce Fienberg, 75; Melvin Wax, 87; and Rose Mallinger, 97.

Earlier Thursday, New Light congregation Rabbi Jonathan Perlman told the jury how he also escaped the attack.

When he heard the shooting, Perlman yelled for his congregants to follow him. He crawled out of the sanctuary and led them to a storage room he had discovered only a week earlier.

As he crawled, Perlman lost his yarmulke and glasses. He escaped through a door in the back of the synagogue that led to a neighboring house and climbed a fence to reach safety.

The yarmulke, inscribed in silver Hebrew with words from the Torah, was returned to him a month ago by the FBI. Perlman said it had been missing for more than four years and that he had no idea it had been collected as evidence that day.

As Perlman was trying to hide, he said he saw Weiss, from the Tree of Life congregation.

“I was surprised he was still in the building and brave enough to come down and check on us,” Perlman testified. “He’s a man of wonderful courage to think about others. I was really, really scared.”

Weiss also testified on Thursday and spent about 90 minutes on the witness stand.

A retired Pittsburgh Public Schools science teacher, Weiss led Tree of Life’s junior congregation, which met three Saturdays each month.

The morning of the shooting was the only Saturday that month that children did not attend their classes, he said.

Weiss, who helped prepare for the Shabbat services, said there were 12 people in Pervin Chapel that morning, including Glickman, the Rosenthals and Charny.

When the first shots began, they sounded like a loud crashing, he said.

Irving Younger and Cecil Rosenthal, went out to see what happened, thinking that the custodian might have dropped a tray of glasses preparing for lunch after the service, Weiss said.

He remained in the chapel as Myers continued to pray, knowing that, if he left, the congregation would fall below 10 people in the room, and that they wouldn’t have a minyan, or quorum, to continue.

But, as he stood in the doorway, Weiss said he heard what he knew were gunshots.

“As I was standing there, I could see shell casings bouncing off the floor in front of me,” he said.

Weiss turned back into the room. He heard Myers tell everyone to get down.

As Myers fled behind the sanctuary and called 911, Weiss ran down a side aisle and then went downstairs, where he saw Glickman and David Rosenthal.

“David was saying he wanted to go home, and Audrey was trying to keep him calm and stay with him,” he said.

Weiss continued to make his way to the area of the synagogue where New Light met.

“I went down to make sure they knew to leave their worship space,” he said.

Weiss saw Perlman, Wax and New Light member Barry Werber, who was on his phone with 911.

“I told them to stay out of sight. There’s shooting upstairs,” Weiss said.

In the 15 seconds that he was there, Weiss said, he saw Wax open the door of the area where they were hiding to look outside.

Perlman, who said Wax was nearly deaf, might not have known what was happening when the shooting started.

He said he heard Wax say, “‘Whatever it is, it must be over. I want to see what happened.’”

“I said to him, ‘Please don’t. Find a place to hide,’” Perlman said. “And he wouldn’t listen to me.”

Wax later moved toward the door and opened it, witnesses testified earlier in the trial. That’s when Bowers shot him.

As Weiss concluded his testimony, he showed the path he took to escape the synagogue on an intricate, scale 3-D model being used as a government exhibit.

“If you did not know the building, it was a maze,” Weiss said.

He traced his steps from the Pervin Chapel downstairs to safety through the main sanctuary of the building.

As he concluded his testimony, Song asked Weiss if Tree of Life has had trouble making its minyan since the attack.

He said yes.

“We don’t have the same attendance from those members who were reliably there,” Weiss answered. “They were killed.”