TikTok user and Target employee @odeis posted the video, which can be seen here, on August 10, and begins with the workers sitting on the floor of an aisle, tucked up against the rails.
“Call the police,” shouted someone. “Can somebody call the police,” they added.
The workers then ran towards the cash office together, as the individual recording entered the key code to unlock it. “Go, go,” he shouted at them as they entered the room.
Although little information was given from the video in regard to the incident, many speculated that it occurred in a Pennsylvania location. However, Odei later confirmed that it was actually a Crestwood Target store, a Chicago suburb.
“I’m going to try to make this quick, but this happened in Chicago. This did not happen in Pennsylvania. Let me clear that up,” he said in a follow-up video posted to his account.
In Pennsylvania, a Target store shooting left one person dead and one person injured just three days ago.
In the same video, Odei narrated what happened, confirming that no one was shot or injured. “I was up front. I was going up front ten minutes before close and we had to get a drink, pay for it and leave. But all of a sudden we just hear these three workers, and they’re like: ’there’s a gun! There’s a gun! Get down!’ In my head i’m like ‘ok, this can be either like a mass shooting, this could be like a 1-on-1, or this could be anything.”
He added that they were sitting by the 10th register, which was relatively far away from the individuals. “When I looked up there was a guy at the window getting thrown. The guy gets thrown to the floor. He was getting jumped. And that’s when they pulled out the guns, but nobody got shot. Let me clear that up. Nobody got shot.
“And so, there were maybe like 15 people behind me. Girl I did. I ran, sprinted, opened that door, put that code in, I don’t know how I remembered it, but I put that code in. I got everybody in and then we called the cops. We just called them again.”
“They got there in eight minutes. The people got away. Slow a** cops. We were in the shopping areas, so usually there’s cops around just driving around but just not that day, even though there was a shooting like two hours prior in the place next to us,” he added.
“I don’t know, but nobody got shot. No one got hurt. We’re all good. It was just a scary a** experience.”
Odei also responded to criticism for filming a video instead of calling the police, explaining that people were already on the phone to them when he filmed the clip.
Target confirmed to Newsweek that there was a physical fight in the store but that no gun was involved and there were no injuries. Target also added that law enforcement handled the altercation.
This isn’t the first time that a TikTok video has captured the initial reactions to a suspected shooting. At the start of July, two teenagers’ responses to a shooting at a carnival went viral, after one seemed nonchalant about the ordeal while filming, leaving many to reflect on the apparent attitude towards shootings in the U.S.
Newsweek has contacted Odei, and Crestwood Police Department for comment.
Update 8/11/21, 12:25 p.m. ET: This article has been updated to include background information from Target.