"We were trying to shield the kids": Mother recounts escaping Highland Park parade shooting
Natalie Lorentz and her family had just sat down on the curb to watch the Fourth of July parade when the shooting in Highland Park, Illinois, began. Lorentz, who was there with her three young boys, husband and mother, said the shooting sounded "like rapid fire."
"We got down on the ground as fast as we could, and my husband saw a shooter and was like, 'There's a shooter.' Then we got up and started running," Lorentz told CBS News. "I grabbed my youngest son. My husband had my other two kids. My mom was running with us. She fell and got separated from us."
Lorentz's mother, Andrea, said she fell next to someone who had been shot.
"The guy next to me looked like his leg was shot off and the woman in front of him was completely covered with blood," she said. "When I saw that I'm like, 'You just need to get up and run.'"
Lorentz, who soon reunited with her mother, said her instinct was to protect her children from the bloodshed around them.
"People that had been shot, that we were trying to shield the kids so they didn't see, they were being taken away to an ambulance and we just kept walking, trying to get away from there," she said.
Lorentz told CBS News that it was the worst moment of her life. She believes two parents sitting inches away from her family didn't survive the shooting.
"I feel like I am still in shock," she said. "I feel like I am still in complete panic mode. I don't know how to even make sense of this or begin to process this when I keep thinking that could have been us. How did we survive? Like, why did we survive?"
She now worries what the future holds for her family.
"It used to be a freak occurrence and now this is not," she said. "This is commonplace. This is a fact of life. This is the world that we live in right now, and that we are raising our kids in and it is not OK."
