Monday, May 15, 2023, was supposed to be her day off from her job at the Bonnie Dallas Senior Center in Farmington, Susan Saiz said, so, ordinarily, she wouldn’t have been anywhere near North Dustin Avenue that fateful morning.
But Saiz had been called into work unexpectedly. After finishing her duties shortly before 11 a.m. that day, she climbed into her silver Toyota SUV and headed for home.
Just a few blocks north of East Apache Street, her routine drive up Dustin Avenue quickly took an unexpected and harrowing turn. Saiz saw several police vehicles stopped in the street ahead of her, lights flashing, then heard what she thought were several firecrackers exploding to her left.
Moments later, she heard the sound of two distinct dings in her car. Worried that she had struck something with her vehicle, she instinctively slowed down, but sped up again when she saw police officers rushing toward her, their weapons drawn.
“That’s when I knew I was in the middle of a crossfire,” she said. “The officers told me to get out of there.”
Saiz lurched her wheel to the right, jumping a curb, then took the first right turn she came to, quickly encountering another driver from the other direction headed toward the shooting. Badly shaken, Saiz rolled down her window and warned the other driver, then drove to her mother’s house on the east side of Farmington, understanding only partially the predicament from which she had escaped.
When she arrived, she began explaining to her sister Gloria Montoya, who was visiting, what she had encountered. Coincidentally, Montoya had been monitoring the police scanner that morning and had heard the chatter about the incident, becoming concerned enough to try to call Saiz and warn her to avoid the area on her drive home. That call went unanswered, reaching Saiz just as she was headed north through the scene.
As the two continued to piece together what had happened, they decided to drive to a nearby convenience store to get Saiz a soft drink, thinking it might calm her nerves.
It wasn’t until they walked up to Saiz’s Toyota that they saw the damage to her vehicle. In the left, back-seat door, there was a bullet hole.
“Oh, my God, Sue, you were hit!” Montoya exclaimed.
Saiz opened the door and saw that the projectile had come out the interior panel of at an angle, leaving a jagged, much larger hole in the plastic and vinyl beneath the door handle.
Following that angle, Saiz and Montoya quickly discovered another hole in the front passenger seat, followed by a hole in the interior of the front passenger-side door and, finally, a small protrusion and paint chip in the door’s exterior, just to the right of the door handle.
All of that damage apparently was caused by a single projectile, a shot presumably fired at Saiz’s passing vehicle by 18-year-old Beau Wilson, the shooter who killed three women and wounded two police officers during his deadly rampage that morning.
“I have to believe I was the last person – I was his last target before they took him down,” Saiz said, noting that from her understanding of incident, Wilson was shot and killed by Farmington police only seconds after she drove through the scene.
More: One year later, Farmington Police reflect on 2023 mass shooting
Saiz said she doesn’t enjoy dwelling on the incident, especially after she filed a police report and was told by a Farmington officer that she likely would have been struck by the gunshot if she had been driving only slightly slower that morning. But she hasn’t been able to get the damage to her SUV fixed because she didn’t carry comprehensive or collison insurance on the Toyota, and her insurer told her the damage was classified as vandalism.
Saiz said she also applied for financial help from a fund that was established to help people who had suffered property damage during the shooting. But she said she was told her application was rejected because the money was only intended to help people with the amount of their deductible, not the fully amount of the damage.
Saiz said she has taken the vehicle to two body shops for estimates, with one coming in at $8,500 and another one at $9,000 – neither of which is affordable for her, she said.
Fortunately, the gunfire did not strike the SUV’s engine, so it the vehicle is fully operational. But Saiz said it is difficult to routinely be reminded of how close she came to being another one of Wilson’s victims that day.
“Everyday,” she said, responding to a question about how often she thinks about those events. “Everyday when I go to get in my car. … It’s just awful.”
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This article originally appeared on Farmington Daily Times: Farmington's Susan Saiz narrowly avoided being shot on May 15, 2023
