Neighbor describes bullets flying, officers being hit in Charlotte, NC shooting

CHARLOTTE, N.C. – Saing Chhoeun was leaving his house shortly after 1 p.m. Monday when members of a U.S. Marshals Service task force raced into his yard, taking cover behind a powder-blue Honda sedan.

As gunfire blasted through the yard of the two-story home next door, Chhoeun, 54, began livestreaming to Facebook from his iPhone. And he took cover behind the most solid thing he could think of: a battered white refrigerator-freezer sitting under the carport, steps away from where officers where firing at the house.

“I wasn’t panicked or scared. I was calm," said Chhoeun, a Cambodian refugee who works as a commercial printer. “I was hiding behind a freezer full of a meat – wasn’t a bullet coming through that.”

The incident left four officers dead and another four injured. The suspected shooter, 39-year-old Terry Clark Hughes Jr., was fatally shot by police, Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department Chief Johnny Jennings said during a news conference.

Chhoeun's son, Jay Chhoeun, 30, had just come home and was upstairs in his room when the shooting began. Tuesday morning, he looked at the bullet holes in the neighboring house and worried aloud about how dangerous the incident was to everyone.

Bullet holes are obvious in the white wood second-story siding of the brick home on Galway Drive, and the screen on the second-story window facing the Chhoeuns' house has big holes where officers fired through it.

Both Chhoeun and his son said they'd seen the suspect around but never spoke with him. Jay Chhoeun said he believed the man was dating a woman who lived at the house.

“He kind of gave me a weird feeling, like not a person I could trust," Jay Chhoeun said.

Saing Chhoeun said he watched as one officer and then another was hit by gunfire from the rear of the brick home, and heard the frantic calls for assistance. He said two women ran outside the house, as did another man, and authorities crashed an armored vehicle through his backyard to reach the two downed officers.

"They do what they gotta do to get the officer who was shot," he said, looking at the twisted fencing and deep ruts left by the vehicle, which officers later used to rip the front of the house open so they could send a drone in. "I've seen a lot of movies and knew what was coming."

Saing Chhoeun said he didn't see how the suspect died or was removed from the house – by then, he said, he'd texted his son to let him inside and took cover in the basement.