North Texas SC head coach Javier Cano has recalled surviving a fatal mass shooting at a mall with his wife and 22-month-old child.
Cano, 39, decided to take a family trip to the Allen Premium Outlets on May 6 with his wife, Melanie, who needed to buy some items ahead of a week-long business trip in North Carolina.
And a last-minute decision to look in a J.Crew store may have proved pivotal for the family, who were heading back to their car as shots rang out shortly after they entered. "We were on our way to our car and last second, she saw a J.Crew store,” soccer coach Cano told The Athletic.
"She told me, ‘It’s been a very long time without coming to the store. So maybe I can find something for sure to fit me and maybe you can find some shorts like you’re looking for.’”
He added: "We’re going through and less than a minute later, everything started to happen."
Once people inside the store had realised what was going on, Cano, his wife Melanie, and daughter Lyra were among the visitors who managed to get into the storage at the back of J.Crew. “This time, everything was so repetitive,” Cano recalled, as shots from an AR-15-style assault rifle rang out.
"You can hear like pa-pa-pa-pa-pa. All the people started to run from the street. I remember people coming inside the store and screaming like ‘active shooter outside, active shooter. Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go.’
"My wife was by the entrance of the store and I was a little farther, but I’m still really close to the entrance. My wife didn’t realize it (was happening). … We were just running, trying to put everyone in the back of the store in storage.”
Cano says the shooter was essentially "the wall behind" them and says he, his family, and others stayed quiet as the shooting continued. "This moment was maybe four or five minutes after the first shooting we heard, but when we went inside (the storage room), we heard more active shooting and the sound was very, very close,” Cano added.
"When you review the map, it was the wall behind us. We heard it so, so close that we thought a shooter was in the store. At the moment, we didn’t have access to the cameras and all this stuff. We were very, very quiet, trying to not make any noise because we didn’t know what is going on. Those moments were scary, very scary.
“Imagine you hear the shots. Do you just run away? You don’t know what happened, how many people are outside. You know absolutely nothing. When you are hiding, you still listen (to) the shootings. You just need to wait there and pray and try to think it’s not coming to you.”
Cano was in fight or flight mode and was ready to "kill or to die" had his family came under direct threat. "In my mind, in that moment, I will do everything in my hand to not lose them," he said. "It’s the thing you love the most: your wife, your daughter, your legacy, your everything. In that moment, if I heard any noise, my mind was trained, like, to kill or to die.”
Those inside J.Crew managed to gain access to security cameras and waited for the emergency services to arrive. The shooter was neutralised by police after eight tragically lost their lives and another seven were left injured.
Cano and his wife Melanie saw the bodies of some of the victims. "If we don’t change our mind to come to J.Crew and we decide to go to our car, we were in a plastic bag, for sure," He said. "My car was in the direction where the active shooter was.”
And Cano wasted little to no time in getting his family as far away from the mall as possible after speaking to FBI agents at a nearby recreation center. "I put my baby in the car seat and just turned on the engine and tried to get away,” Cano said.
“It came into my mind, you know, all the way we were walking and just seeing all the bodies, the death, because we saw them on our way outside when the police came (immediately following the shooting). All the pictures came to my mind.
"Now I’m thinking about that less, but that week, every time like I was at home or not working or just having five minutes of pause in my mind, all these pictures in my mind. It wasn’t easy to do.”
Cano, who comes from Utiel, Spain, and had worked for football clubs such as Villarreal and Slavia Prague before moving to the US, had previously been close to another shooting - but in Rome, Italy. "A long time ago, I was unlucky to be near a shooting in Rome,” Cano said.
"I remember in Italy, it didn’t scare me because I thought there were fireworks. For me, it wasn’t scary, but when I realized someone was bleeding, I was like ‘S—, it’s something else.’”
Gun violence and mass shootings in the US are well-documented and a fierce topic of debate. But it's something Cano never expected to happen. After joining DC United in 2018, there was an incident that saw players being hidden after a shooting took place in a nearby neighbourhood during training.
"I never thought this would happen,” Cano said. “I knew in D.C., there are shootings for gangs every other week. I remember training one day in D.C. at the facility and the neighborhood around had a shooting in the middle of training, so we’re hiding the players, but you never know that this will never happen to me. You hear all these stories and you say it’s too far away.”
