(CNN) — The assistant manager of the Tops Friendly Markets store in Buffalo, New York, had already survived a mass shooting.
Nearly 12 years ago, Latisha Rogers and her brother, Danyell Mackin, were at the City Grill restaurant in Buffalo when a man opened fire, killing Mackin and three others. Four people were injured, including one succumbed years later to those wounds.
Then on Saturday, a gunman whose violence authorities said was fueled by racist hatred entered Rogers’ store and began shooting.
“It’s constant, it just shoots. It doesn’t stop. It’s constant,” he told CNN’s Don Lemon on Thursday.
Rogers dialed 911, hidden behind the counter. But the operator treated her request so dismissively that local authorities now intend to fire her at a hearing on May 30, a senior county official said.
The way it came about has compounded Rogers’ trauma.
“I’m back at another massacre and going through this again, trying to find a way to heal,” Rogers said.
Ten people died in the Tops store, including an armed security guard, and three were injured; 11 of the 13 were black. The 18-year-old white man accused of the shooting pleaded not guilty on a first degree murder charge. He is being held without bail until at least his next court appearance on June 9.
Latisha Rogers, an employee at the Buffalo grocery store where 10 people were killed last week in a racist mass shooting, spoke to CNN on Thursday.
“Why do you whisper?”
Rogers I was at the counter A supermarket service attendant with two co-workers, on the phone with a customer, when she heard “loud bangs” in quick succession, she told CNN.
“I looked out the window and I saw a customer, a lady with her shopping cart, who stopped, and she had a really weird look on her face and she turned to run,” Rogers said.
The next thing we heard was “boom, boom, boom.” “The only thing we could do was throw ourselves on the ground.”
Rogers hid behind the counter, “praying he didn’t see me,” he said, referring to the assailant.
“I was trying to think fast,” he said. She reached into her back pocket, grabbed her phone and dialed 911. “I proceeded to whisper because I didn’t know how many people were in the store or anything, I didn’t want to be heard.”
In a low voice, Rogers implored, “‘Please send help, there’s a person in the store shooting.'”
“‘What? I can’t hear you,'” the operator replied, he said. “‘Why are you whispering? You don’t have to whisper, they can’t hear you.'”
Nervous, Rogers dropped her phone, she said. The operator kept talking, but Rogers couldn’t make out the words.
“He said something and then he hung up the phone,” said Rogers, who then put his phone on silent in case someone called.
Rogers then dialed her boyfriend and, in the same tone he used with the operator, asked him to call 911 to report “a person in the store shooting.” A co-worker then video-called Rogers to ask where he was, and in that same tone, he relayed his location and asked her to call 911.
When that call ended, Rogers realized the store had gone “absolutely silent,” he said. Even the music had been turned off somehow.
“The silence in the store was total, eerie, and I would hear him walking around,” she said. “It sounded like he was walking on glass, you could hear it crunching under his feet.”
Rogers remained hidden, waiting, until she heard the police and saw an officer escorting an employee. When she came out from behind the counter, all she saw was “bodies,” she said.
“It wasn’t a pretty scene at all,” she said, shaking and fighting back tears. “The first person I saw was the security guard, Aaron Salter. And I knew it was him, because of his uniform.”
“Seeing what I saw, I wouldn’t want anyone to experience that ever, ever.”
911 call under investigation
The 911 operator who spoke with Rogers was placed on administrative leave Monday, Erie County officials said.
It was unclear who ended the call, but “the 911 operator was inappropriate,” County Executive Mark Poloncarz said at a news conference Wednesday.
“We teach our 911 operators that if someone is whispering, it probably means they’re in trouble” and the caller may be in “an area of concern, not only in terms of active assailants, but potentially in terms of domestic violence that someone may be calling about,” he said.
A hearing will be held on May 30 “in which our intention is to terminate the 911 operator who acted totally inappropriately, without following protocol,” he said, reiterating that the operator’s tone was a “totally inappropriate response.” in a “terrible situation”.
The name of the operator will not be released, due to the department’s rules regarding anyone under administrative suspension or leave, Poloncarz said.
The response time from law enforcement to shooting was not affected by Rogers’ handling of the call, Erie County spokesman Peter Anderson said Wednesday.
Central Police Services on Sunday reviewed all calls related to the shooting, Poloncarz explained. “They identified this call, the issue associated with it, as completely unacceptable.”
Rogers is not “a heartless person,” she told CNN, but she thinks the 911 operator should lose her job.
“Right is right and wrong is wrong,” he said. “It was like she was bothering her, and I feel like when she hung up on me, she didn’t call back.”
“I feel like he left me to my own devices, and I legitimately thought I was going to die that day.”
— CNN’s Kristina Sgueglia, Curt Devine, Mark Morales and Caroll Alvarado contributed to this report.