BUFFALO, N.Y. (WKBW) — Fragrance Harris Stanfield stands alongside her husband while sharing the moments of the mass shooting that happened at Tops Market on Jefferson Avenue in Buffalo.
“My neck became stressed, and I literally don’t know why and then I turned to my daughter to tell her that I was in pain and before I could open my mouth to tell her we heard gunshots,” Stanfield says.
Stanfield has been working at Tops for years.
She says when the shooting happened, she saw security guard and retired Buffalo Police officer Aaron Salter Jr. who was later killed backing up and reaching for his weapon, which prompted her and her daughter to run.
“Everyone started running. I grabbed my daughter she pulled her arm away from me,” she says. “I thought she was behind me.”
Then Stanifled fell to the ground when a lady bumped into her, and she thought it was over, but she got up and kept on running.
“But I kept running until I got all the way to the back door, but a co-worker of mine tried to get the door opened since it was stuck and we were afraid if someone was on the other side of the door, but thankfully there was no one and we ran outside,” she says.
As the mother was escaping from the gunshots and not knowing if her daughter was alive, she says her 20-year-old daughter Yahnia Brown-McReynolds was close to the shooter.
“He shot two people in front of her one-person survived the other person he shot perished they were standing where we were standing and he walked right by her. He did not see her,” Stanfield says. “She didn’t move and she just stayed as still and silent as possible she heard someone saying call 911 but she didn’t move because she was in panic mode, but she didn’t move because she didn’t want to be noticed that she was there.”
Ultimately, Fragrance Harris Stanfield and her daughter reunited after police arrested the shooter.
“No community deserves this, and someone came from far away try to destroy us and something that we have,” she says. “You see our community we come together it’s not just Black and White and for him to think that he can come here and destroy something that we have is a horrible thought and I just pray that we just get this back for us.”
