San Bernardino, California (CNN) Denise Peraza wasn’t sure if the phone call to her sister might be her last. She had just been shot in the back.
“I just want to tell you that I love you,” Peraza told Stephanie Baldwin through tears.
“And then she said she had to go and she hung up,” Baldwin told CNN affiliate KABC.
Peraza — who was treated at a local hospital and is expected to be OK — was one of the people inside the Inland Regional Center in San Bernardino, California, Wednesday morning when two people barged into a holiday party and opened fire, killing at least 14 people and injuring 17 others.
“As soon as the gunfire started, everyone dropped to the floor and they were underneath desks, and she was trying to shield herself with a chair, along with a man next to her,” said Baldwin. “Then, all of a sudden, she said she just felt (the bullet) going through her back.”
Peraza, like others at the party, worked for the County Department of Environmental Health and was only at Inland Regional Center — an agency for people with developmental disabilities — for the holiday event, her relatives said.
Peraza’s ordeal was just one of many that played out through hushed phone calls and hurried texts after police said shooter Syed Farook — who was at the party and left after some kind of confrontation — and Tashfeen Malik attacked the partygoers.
Survivors, relatives and other witnesses spoke of the harrowing moments.
‘It was horrific’
Social worker Melinda Rivas was working on the third floor of Building 2 of Inland when a co-worker came running down the hallway shouting that a shooter was downstairs.
“We all started running and screaming,” she said.
Rivas believed the shooting was in Building 3, where there’s an auditorium that’s not usually locked and where public health employees were holding a Christmas party. The auditorium is frequently rented out to outside agencies, she said.
Rivas and 46 other employees were told to go into a conference room, she said. “There’s 47 of us, and we were told just to lay down, sit down, comfort each other and pray with each other.”
She called her twin adult children, both 21, and told them about the shooter and to “be safe.”
“It was horrific,” Rivas said of the experience.
About 20 minutes later, authorities told the 47 people in the conference room to come out — with their hands raised.
“We were all just scared to leave with our hands up,” she said.
More than six hours later, after being interviewed by authorities, Rivas and scores of Inland employees were bused to the Rudy Hernandez Community Center to make a final checkout with officials.
On the bus ride to the center, a co-worker recounted to several people on the bus how he saw two gunmen enter Building 3 and begin firing on everybody without saying a word, said Rivas, who added that the co-worker’s shirt was stained with blood.
“Pray for us”
All Terry Pettit could do was worry as he stood near the offices of Inland Regional Center.
News of shootings was spreading fast and all Pettit knew about his daughter inside the building came from her text messages on his cell phone.
“Shooting at my work. People shot.”
“Pray for us. I am locked in an office.”
Pettit wept for his daughter as he spoke Wednesday afternoon with reporters. Sirens blared in the background.
“She’s been hiding,” he said.
