HIGHLANDS RANCH, Colo. – A sheet of plastic covers Farook Patail’s shattered glass door and a piece of duct tape covers the bullet hole through his bedroom window.
“Right here,” Patail said as he pointed to another bullet hole through his closet door.
“I go to work, bring groceries, look [after] my wife, and that's all I do,” Patail said as he stood in disbelief, looking at the hole that likely sent a bullet into his shoulder.
He pulled his shirt to the side to show the dressing around his gunshot wound.
He described what happened. He said he heard a gunshot and quickly called for his wife, a woman suffering from dementia.
“I took her that corridor right there and then I told her to get down, stay there,” he said.
“Then, it was a series of shooting, stop, shooting, stop,” Patail added, “After that, at that time, I wasn’t hurt or anything. We were safe.”
Then he said he went silent.
“Then I told my wife, ‘Let’s go in the bed. I think it’s over,’” but moments later even more gunfire erupted.
He laughed and said, “Actually, it’s not over.”
The Douglas County Sheriff’s office said the suspect fire more than 100 rounds on Sunday morning.
Patail said it was those bullets that flew through his bedroom window.
“I know I was hit. So, I rolled down and I yelled at her, ‘Go down, go down!’ Because, I cannot come walk to her,” he said.
The couple stayed down. Patail lie bleeding in the hallway.
“It went in, and then there's the joint. It stopped right here,” he said as he pointed at his wound.
In Sunday’s shooting, Deputy Zackari Parrish was killed, four other officers were injured, and Patail was one of two civilians shot.
“Compared to those officers, this is nothing,” he said.
On Tuesday, Douglas County Sheriff Tony Spurlock was at the complex, looking back on Sunday morning’s deadly scene. He offered no comment about what was inside.
However, the destruction remained easy to see from the outside.