A brave nurse who survived the deadly shooting at First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, Texas, revealed on Wednesday how she immediately jumped into action in an effort to save the lives of fellow parishioners.
Julie Workman told The New York Daily News that she had just one minute to process the carnage that unfolded inside First Baptist, where she was worshipping on Sunday morning, after a bullet grazed her chest and gunman Devin Kelley shot her 34-year-old son, among scores of others.
After the shooting ended, Workman, who is a nurse at CHRISTUS Santa Rosa Hospital — Alamo Heights in San Antonio, Texas, immediately stood up, ran out to her car, grabbed supplies to create tourniquets and started sifting through the dead and suffering bodies laying all over the church’s floor.
In the end, she treated five victims before emergency workers arrived, and very likely likely saved lives.
Among those she helped was Zachary Poston, 18, who reportedly survived the ordeal after his grandma, 56-year-old Peggy Lynn Warden — a volunteer Sunday school teacher at the church — helped shield his body from a storm of bullets.
Poston, though, was still hurt badly, having been shot five or six times and might have died had Workman not attended church that Sunday and applied emergency supplies to help him, as the nurse told the Daily News.
“That strong boy was screaming. He was hurt, he was bleeding and he was screaming,” she said. “He’s one tough big cookie.”
As Faithwire previously reported, Jimmy Stevens, Warden’s brother, said Poston’s survival came after Warden’s selfless act of protecting her grandson. Warden was among the 26 who were killed.
“My sister — as someone who would serve and protect — put her body over his when the shooting started,” he said. “And that’s when she got shot.”
Stevens said Warden “died serving the Lord” and that “she will be missed every day.”
A GoFundMe set up by Poston’s great aunt offers more details about the injuries he sustained, as the family has raised over $12,000 of the intended $50,000 for Poston’s recovery and education.
“Upon arriving at the hospital he went into surgery. The first of many was to put in pins to hold his bones together and to support his left wrist which was hanging on by ligaments and tendons,” Korri Scheel Stevens wrote. “He will need many more surgeries and is looking at a long road to recovery.”
Faithwire also told you about Joann Ward, the mother who reportedly saved two of her kids’ lives when she pushed daughter Rihanna Garza, 9, to the floor and shielded three of her younger children from the bullets being fired.
Thank God for heroes like Workman, Warden and Ward.