Gabriel Eslami can’t stop remembering the smell of gun smoke in the air, the screams of the wounded and bodies everywhere after Saturday’s grizzly massacre outside a popular nightclub in Birmingham, Alabama, that left four people dead and seventeen others injured hit.
Eslami himself is one of the victims. He was hit by a bullet that tore through his leg and buttock and then cut into his penis, he told The Post.
The 24-year-old was waiting with his friends in a line of about a hundred people outside the Hush Lounge in Birmingham’s Five Points neighborhood when he heard gunfire and felt the shot.
Authorities have now identified the dead as Anitra Holloman, 21, Tahj Booker, 27, and Carlos McCain, 27, and Roderick Lynn Patterson Jr., 26, AL.com reports this.
“It was like a series of Black Cat bangers, but a million times louder. It reverberated through the buildings,” Eslami said.
Eslami tried to run away, but felt his left leg go numb, leaving him crumpled in the street with blood gushing from a gunshot wound.
“I looked back and all I saw were bodies on the sidewalk. The air was full of smoke, gun smoke, illuminated by the street lights. It was creepy… People were running and their shoes fell off. There were wallets, keys, phones everywhere,” Eslami recalls.
The gunmen, who are currently at large with a $100,000 reward for their arrest, were after just one intended target when they fired at least 100 bullets into the bustling nightlife district before fleeing in a car, police said.
The attack may have been a hired assassination and police suspect that at least one of their weapons was fitted with an illegal ‘Glock switch’ that allowed the weapon to fire on full automatic.
Eslami’s doctors told him the bullet missed a major artery by several millimeters.
At the time, Eslami was terrified that we would bleed to death. He saw a bystander hiding behind a car and begged him for help.
“I said, ‘I’ve been hit! I’m hit!’ I was hoping he would come to me and apply pressure, but he just looked at me,” Eslami said. “It was an every man for himself situation.”
Eslami said “pools of blood” poured from his leg onto the pavement before doctors rushed him to a nearby hospital.
“When my parents came, they saw that people were being told: ‘I’m sorry, your son or daughter has died.’ People fainted in the hallway.”
Eslami is recovering at home with little more than a cut on his genitals and a bullet hole in his butt, earning him the nickname “Forrest Gump” from his friends.
“I can joke about it, but that’s because I’m blessed. Some people couldn’t get off that sidewalk.”
