Street Sees Action During Hostage Situation

By Rebecca Friedman

Sitting at his desk sipping the Caramel Macchiato that he had picked up from the Starbucks across the street, Michael Chambers was helping his customers upgrade their phone package. When Chambers looked through the glass windows across from his desk he saw something odd, police cars and people running down the street.

“I was thinking, what is everybody running from?” said Chambers 23, who works as a sales representative at the Verizon store across the street from the Discovery Channel building that was taken hostage on September 1^st of this year. Colesville Road, the street across from the Discovery Channel saw plenty of action the day James J. Lee stormed the Discovery Channel building and took three hostages, with Lee eventually being shot and killed.

“Everybody was here. SWAT team, everything was blocked off. They had the bomb squad,” said Chambers, bouncing on his toes and acting the scene out for his fellow employees. The young man is like a little boy describing his favorite action movie when he discusses what happened that day

Though Chambers was having a good time describing what had happened, there is downside to his story. While all the action was happening, people were running into the Verizon store “traumatized. It was like a refugee camp,” said Chambers.

Verizon was not the only store on Colesville Road to see the events of the day.

“At 1:00 we noticed a bunch of people funneling about the street,” said Michael Garson 39, general manager of Flippin Pizza a small restaurant next to Verizon. This is a sobering fact considering that the pizza joint “had a delivery at Discovery, 12:45. He must have just missed the guy,” said Garson. One of Garson’s employees nudges him, telling him to tell who called the restaurant that day. Garson laughs and says, “You know something’s going on when CNN, TMZ, Fox News, is calling.” Garson felt it was important to talk to the media. “We heard so many things that were inaccurate. They said everyone was evacuated, but they weren’t. The garage doors open up and hundreds of people come flying out.”

Even with the streets blocked off and the restaurant on lockdown, Garson still managed to do good during a bad situation. He gave out free pizza to the businesses on the street and those that were forced to stay in the restaurant due to the lockdown. When asked about it Garson just shrugs it off. “We fed them because where we’re they going to go to eat?”

Like Chambers, Garson is in amazement at all the enforcement that came out.

“It was like a movie, the actually ending. You never hear the SWAT team coming in.” In a way it could be portrayed as a fairytale as all three hostages that Lee took were not hurt, nor were any of the 1,900 Discovery employees according to Yahoo News.

There are those who just wanted to leave the situation alone. “ I wasn’t really thinking about them [those who were in the Discovery building],” said Stephanie Moore, 21, a student at Sanz, a college on Colesville Road. School had just been dismissed and Moore wanted to leave the growing crowd.

Of course there are those who saw it play out until the very end. With a grin on his face and shaking his head, Chambers chuckles. “It was an interesting day.”

####