Jeff Leon, an attendee of Highland Park’s Fourth of July parade, says he heard what “sounded like a string of firecrackers going off inside of a big metal trash bin,” while he was seated across from the Bluemercury store.
Leon said he heard maybe 20 or 30 pops before looking to his right and seeing police movement and people falling, that’s when he and his wife took off.
Leon and his wife were at the parade because their 14-year-old twin boys were marching with the high school football team but the boys still hadn’t come down the parade route when the gunshots broke out, he told CNN’s Victor Blackwell.
“We were going to try to get them,” Leon explained adding that “after about 10 minutes of this sort of duck and hide, duck and hide, people were sort of calmly walking away from the scene.”
Leon and his wife say they saw a man “who had an obvious extremely deep bullet graze wound along the right side of his head above the temple,” and that’s when they both realized that it wasn’t firecrackers or fireworks that went off, but it was in fact a shooting.
Leon said that a shooting in the Highland Park community in Illinois is “just inconceivable.”
