The fifth person on the State Street Bridge was on his cellphone with his mom when the shot was fired.
He thought it could have been a car backfiring at first, but then, he’d heard the real thing in the mountains and deserts across the world from Chicago. And when he saw people running, he knew.
“Hey, mom, I just heard a gunshot,” he recalled.
Then he saw people clearing the area, screaming. He hung up and rushed to the scene.
A few days ago I wrote a column about five people on the bridge. Why this incident on Aug. 8, 2011, has grabbed me, and many of you, I can’t really say.
Is the reason to be found in the random nature of it, because any of us could have been on that bridge, and so it grabs us the way the Thornton Wilder novel “The Bridge of San Luis Rey” grabs anyone who has read it and won’t let them go?
Or it is the fact that it takes place during a crossing, and that the act of strangers crossing over adds to the weight of things? I don’t know. But I can tell you this:
There was the victim who fell and the shooter who ran; and the student from the military academy and his mom who helped. But there was that fifth person, who bandaged the victim’s head with calm confidence.
The identity of the fifth person has been a mystery, until today.
His name is Kyle Smith, 36. He and his wife, Cristina, a teacher, will celebrate their 10th wedding anniversary in January. They have two young sons.
“Obviously, your mind’s thinking 1,000 things a minute,” Smith recalled. “This is a very personal incident. Somebody wanted him dead. I’m thinking, this is a hit.”
The victim was Todd Brown, who worked in a steakhouse kitchen and had a long arrest record. As he walked across the bridge, another man, the shooter, a man in black shorts, came up behind him.
Shane Carroll, 20, is a student at New Mexico Military Institute. He and his mother, Ann Carroll, were hurrying across, going to dinner, as rain began to pour from the sky. Shane told police that he saw the shooter point a handgun at Brown’s head and pull the trigger and run.
Amazingly, Brown survived. He’s in Cook County Jail now, on a weapons charge, the bullet still lodged in the back of his head.
The fifth person, the one we now know as Kyle Smith, was about 40 yards away when the shooting occurred. He couldn’t see the gunman.
“I kind of inadvertently reached for my weapon,” Smith said, but he wasn’t armed.
Smith is a police officer in West Chester, Ohio. He’s a member of the SWAT team. He also served in the Army as a sergeant in the 3rd Ranger Battalion in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Just before the shooting, Kyle Smith was on his way to a job interview with the FBI.
What he did see was a man running away from the scene, and he thought at first that the running man was the shooter. But it turned out to be a bystander who unsuccessfully chased after the gunman.
Smith approached Brown, who was slumped on the ground on the edge of the bridge, bleeding profusely from his head wound. He held Brown’s head. And then he saw something poking out of the folds of Brown’s pants, near the ankles. It was a shell casing.
You can see him, can’t you, administering to the fallen man, when he sees the evidence. What happened next happened in slow motion:
The casing falling out of Brown’s clothes, hitting the street with a “tink,” rolling to the bridge edge. Smith setting Brown’s head down as he begins scrambling after the casing as it rolls.
He reaches out his hand, catching it just before it drops into the Chicago River.
Smith recalled that he put the casing back on the ground, and asked someone there — he can’t remember whom — to place a piece of paper over it. Then he returned to the victim.
At that point, Smith didn’t even know that the bullet never exited the wound.
“All of a sudden, his eyes blink open. And I can’t believe he’s alive,” Smith said.
By then, Shane Carroll had removed his orange cotton T-shirt, and Smith used it as a tourniquet. Some busboys from a restaurant brought towels.
Smith tried talking to Brown, with questions like: What’s your name? Did you see anything? Do you remember who shot you?
“No, man, no,” Brown told him.
Here’s the way Kyle Smith considered it: odd.
“It was very odd, just my personal opinion,” Smith said. “He was definitely trying to say as little as possible. It was almost as if he’d been down this block before, so to speak.”
Or, had crossed that bridge.
After Chicago police arrived, Smith called his applicant coordinator at the FBI to tell her why he was late for the interview. She asked if he wanted to delay their meeting, but he said, no, it would be good to get it done.
According to the FBI, Kyle Smith will begin training at the FBI facility at Quantico, Va., as a conditional employee.
An FBI official told me that it was Smith’s calm demeanor in crisis on that bridge, and his act of kindness and helping, that sealed his appointment.
After Smith spoke to the FBI, he had one more call to make.
“Mom,” said Smith, “you won’t believe it …”
