With his hands bound behind him and tied to a metal bar, Eduardo Sanchez watched in terror as his former co-worker waited for the arrival of each employee of Windy City Core Supply, gunning each of them down seconds after they came through the front door.
Salvador Tapia had inexplicably tied up Sanchez instead of shooting him Wednesday morning at the warehouse at 3912 S. Wallace St. While Tapia bound the 48-year-old worker’s hands he told him he would not kill him, Sanchez recalled Thursday.
But as Sanchez listened to the cries of doomed co-workers and the crack of gunfire, he knew he was in peril.
“When he said he was not going to kill me, I was nervous,” said Sanchez, one of two workers who managed to escape the massacre. “But I was thinking, after a while, he’ll change his mind.”
A day after the bloodiest Chicago-area workplace rampage in recent memory, police were still trying to decipher the motives that made Tapia, a 36-year-old former employee of Windy City Core Supply, snap six months after he was fired. In addition to the fatal shot fired by a police officer, some of Tapia’s wounds appeared to be self-inflicted, police and Sanchez said.
Police found several handwritten notes in Spanish in Tapia’s pockets, spokesman David Bayless said, but investigators said the notes were “cryptic” and difficult to decipher.
Tapia was working for Windy City five years ago when Robert Bruggeman became a partner in the business.
Bruggeman said no one had checked to see if Tapia had a criminal record, and Tapia never said anything about his 1989 conviction for unlawful use of a weapon or his numerous arrests for threatening and attacking his girlfriend, family members and a neighbor.
“He seemed fine until about a year ago. Then he seemed to go downhill,” Bruggeman said. About six months before Tapia was fired, his attitude changed dramatically for the worse, said Bruggeman. Tapia was fired in March for “10 different reasons,” Bruggeman said.
`Drunken ramblings’
After Tapia was fired, he would sometimes phone the office and leave “drunken ramblings” on the answering machine, but Bruggeman wasn’t aware that Tapia ever threatened anyone at the company. “I wouldn’t know what would make someone do something like that, anyway.”
As Tapia grew increasingly distressed during Wednesday’s bloodshed, Sanchez said the gunman repeatedly said in Spanish, “I’m going to make these people pay.”
When Sanchez arrived for work Wednesday morning, he saw no one, at first, and then Tapia came up behind him.
“He surprised me with the gun and said, `If you don’t let me tie your hands, I’ll shoot you,'” Sanchez said. The first person to arrive at the warehouse, Daniel Weiner, the son of one of the owners, was already dead of a gunshot wound to the head.
As Tapia accosted his former co-worker, Sanchez recalled, “He told me, `I killed already Danny.’ After he tied my hands he pulled me by the long piece of rope down the ramp” that led to a lower level in the middle of the warehouse. Tapia tied Sanchez to a metal bar and then went back up the ramp to the main corridor.
“He was watching me and he was watching the door.”
After killing Weiner, his uncle Alan Weiner, his father Howard Weiner and three employees, Robert Lee Taylor, Calvin Ramsey and Jose Valles, the gunman apparently shot himself. Sanchez said he thought Tapia shot himself three times.
It was unclear how serious the self-inflicted wounds were but the bizarre scene gave Sanchez the cover he needed to escape. Although his hands were still bound, he had managed to free the rope from the metal bar.
“When he shot himself, he forgot about me” for a moment, said Sanchez, who described how Tapia smeared his face with his own blood. “I think he lost his mind.”
Sanchez escaped by using a back staircase that brought him to the first floor by the office, where most of the bodies lay. He said he saw the bodies of Howard Weiner and Daniel Weiner as he ran out.
Turned and fled
As he made his way through the door he found another employee, whom Bruggeman identified as Tio Landesma, outside. As Landesma was entering the warehouse, he turned and immediately fled after seeing Tapia with a gun, Sanchez said.
Sanchez said Thursday that he did not know why he was spared. Although he and Tapia were on cordial terms in the years they worked together, Sanchez said they were not friends.
“If he would say hi to me I would say hi to him, but we didn’t have a friendship,” he said. “I just feel like a lucky guy.”
Thursday afternoon Sanchez visited the scene of the shooting with his wife and 7-year-old daughter. He hugged his weeping wife and placed flowers at the crosses that had been set up to honor the victims.
With eyes red from crying and a sleepless night, Bruggeman recalled during an interview at his Elmwood Park home Thursday how he felt when he arrived late at the office Wednesday morning and discovered what had happened.
“I didn’t know what was going on at first. I was told it was a robbery,” he said.
After he found out that his partners and the majority of his staff had been murdered, “I felt a hundred different things: awed, pissed off, mad, scared.”
Bruggeman met the Weiners through mutual business dealings, and the four men decided to combine their efforts into Windy City Core Supply. “They were down-to-earth, good people. They had families and they had lives,” Bruggeman said.
Inside Alan Weiner’s Wilmette home Thursday, friends and family gathered to remember Alan, 50; his brother, Howard, 59, of Northbrook; and Howard’s son, Daniel, 30, of Chicago’s North Side.
The two brothers owned their auto parts business for about 30 years, cousin Bruce Ratskoff said. Their father had been in the scrap metal business before them, he said.
In a statement, the Weiner family said: “Howie [as we all knew him], Alan and Danny loved the fact that each and every day they were able to get up and go to work together and turn the workday into laughs.”
Howard will be remembered as a “crossword puzzle wizard and devoted grandfather,” the statement said. Alan was a “former trampoline state champion with an enormous heart.”
Daniel was a “`Simpsons’-quoting, witty-with-his-words kind of guy who doted on his nephew, Jacob, and attended every Cubs game he could.
`So heartbreaking’
“It is so heartbreaking that such beautiful people could be taken away in such an ugly and violent manner . . . ultimately as a result of the lax control over handguns in our community,” the statement said.
Police and federal agents were still working on tracing the history of the Walther PP .380-caliber handgun Tapia used in the shootings. The gun was originally sold by the Blue Island Gun Shop in 1966, Bayless said. The last official record of the gun was its legal registration in Chicago in 1983, before possession of a handgun in the city was made illegal. Police were seeking to interview the person who then owned the gun.
On Thursday, Mayor Richard Daley said the fatal shootings provide one more illustration of the need for “common sense” gun control legislation, and it showed that threats of violence should be reported to police.
