PALM DESERT AND LOS ANGELES — Most shoppers headed to the Toys R Us in Palm Desert on Friday morning clutching their "door buster" ads and their shopping lists. At least two men walked into the busy store armed with their guns.
Instead of the usual frantic chaos on Black Friday, the year's busiest shopping day, mayhem erupted in the electronics department about 11:30 a.m., leaving two men dead in a gunfight and crowds of shoppers ducking for cover.
Joan Barrick, 40, of Desert Hot Springs said she was buying a Barbie Jeep for her daughter when two women started brawling. As the women swung at each other, the men they were with also started arguing.
The younger of the two lifted up his shirt and flashed his handgun, pulling the grip from his baggy pants pocket. The other man yanked out his own handgun and started chasing him down the aisle and firing, witnesses said.
Barrick hid behind a stack of DVDs and recited the Lord's Prayer. "If I'm going to die, I need to make peace," she said. "A lot of people were crying. I was crying. We were all very, very scared."
As the two men ran shooting through the aisles, shoppers dumped their purchases. LaToya Jenkins, 20, had already bought a remote-control bike. She dropped it and ran. Others left behind shopping carts full of the bargain-priced toys they had come in search of.
Several witnesses saw the gunmen clearly. Some cried out warnings: "He has a gun!" and "¡Pistola! ¡Pistola!" Barrick was so close she could see the smoking gun.
"This is horrible," said a shaken Sara Frahm, 25. "I'm never shopping on Black Friday again."
Clarisa Valerio, 45, of Thermal said that when the man first brandished his gun, she heard him threaten to kill the other. She didn't believe it was real. "Since we were in a toy store, I thought it was a toy gun," Valerio said in Spanish. "My husband pushed me and said: 'Let's go. Didn't you hear what he said?' "
As her husband started heading to safety, Valerio turned back when she remembered that her daughter, 18, was still checking on the price of a toy car set. The shooting started almost immediately.
"I was hysterical," Valerio said. "This man pushed me to the ground. He put his arms around me and his disabled wife and held me."
Riverside County sheriff's officials declined to release the names of the dead men, whose bodies were found near the front of the store. Police retrieved handguns on the floor near both of them.
