Veteran tends to teen shot after cell phone deal goes bad (VIDEO)

Gunfire erupted inside a Dallas Walmart Friday night, but instead of running away, one man ran toward the gunfire and tended to an injured victim until paramedics arrived.

Police say a group of young men met in the McDonald’s inside the Walmart to discuss the sale of a cell phone, but at some point, the meeting turned violent and shots were fired.

Rafael Semmler was at the store with his family when the gunfire erupted and said everyone was screaming and running to get away. Semmler, a military veteran who served as a medic in Kuwait, Iraq, and Bosnia, made sure his family was safe, then ran straight to the area where the gunshots originated.

“You don’t really think about it, it’s just at that time it’s kind of like instinct, it’s what you’ve been trained to do,” Semmler said, “And was my first instinct was to go toward it to see if there’s anything I could do to help out.”

Semmler found the injured man with a gunshot to his arm. He was bleeding profusely and said he was dying. So Semmler grabbed shirts and whatever else he could use to apply pressure to the wounds.

“He just kept telling me, ‘Please don’t leave, just stay with me. Stay here,’ and I told him I’d stay there, so I did,” Semmler said.

The other two men involved in the incident took off and the injured man is expected to survive. Semmler, who never even got the man’s name, said he was just glad he was in the right place at the right time.

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