As Chicago radio personality Terri Hemmert celebrated her birthday at a New Orleans restaurant Friday night, her party came to a sudden halt.
“It was interrupted by a hail of bullets,” the WXRT radio star wrote in a Facebook post Sunday.
Hemmert survived a shooting that police said killed a server at the well-known Mandina’s Restaurant in New Orleans’ Mid-City neighborhood. A Chicago woman and friend of Hemmert’s who has not been identified was shot in the back, Hemmert wrote in her post.
After hitting the floor alongside 28 “precious friends” as gunfire erupted, Hemmert said that people who are tired of hearing about shootings should “think again.”
“It’s no longer a figure of speech when you say you dodged a bullet. And if someone says ‘this is not America’ or ‘this is not us,’ they had better duck,” Hemmert wrote.
The Times-Picayune of New Orleans identified the slain server who police said two assailants targeted as 23-year-old Hilbert Walker III. A private security guard returned fire, interim New Orleans police Superintendent Michelle Woodfork told reporters.
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The shooting caused alarm in New Orleans, a city with an economy dependent on tourism. It came on the first day of the two-weekend Jazz Fest, one of the busiest tourist periods in the city. The wounded 54-year-old Chicago woman was visiting the city to attend the festival, Woodfork said.
Hemmert said she and her friends will never forget the traumatic shooting. The wounded friend, who Hemmert wrote was heading back to Chicago by plane, will carry a bullet in her back, she added.
She reflected on the pervasiveness of gun violence in her post.
“What’s it gonna take? We are afraid of our kids reading a book or seeing a drag queen. But getting shot is the price we pay for so called ‘freedom.’ I’m pissed,” Hemmert wrote.
The Chicago radio personality stayed in her hotel room throughout the weekend, she said. She’ll never be the same after seeing her loved ones “covered with blood,” she wrote.
“As long as we refuse to do something about this epidemic, we are not ‘safe.’ And neither are you. And everyone you love,” Hemmert wrote.
The Associated Press contributed.
