Survivor Plays Possum for 20 Hours Inside Dishwasher

As the minutes turned to hours after the slaughter at Luby’s Cafeteria, the panic subsided and the head-counting began. The one person who could not be accounted for was Mark Mathews, a 19-year-old employee who seemed to have just vanished. He was not on the lists of the survivors, the dead or the wounded.

The mystery was solved at 8 a.m. Thursday. He was found in the industrial dishwasher of the cafeteria kitchen, where he had huddled in terror for almost 20 hours.

He had listened to footsteps in the night and thought the killer was still stalking the cafeteria. In fact, the gunman, George Hennard, had killed himself early Wednesday afternoon.

“I was frightened to death,” said Mathews.

Mathews said he first heard shots being fired while he was in the kitchen of the cafeteria, preparing food to be taken to the steam tables. “I ran behind the dishwasher,” he said. “Then I told myself this is not a very good place to be. So I crawled into the dishwasher.”

Restaurant dishwashers are large and divided into compartments separated by rubber flaps. Mathews said he wormed his way to the middle compartment, then did his best not to move as he heard footsteps coming closer and closer.

He heard the footsteps stop at the dishwasher and he could hear the flaps of the first compartment being pulled aside. Mathews waited, heart racing, for the hand to pull aside the second set of flaps and the gun to go off. Instead, the footsteps trailed off into the distance.

“I thought there were two or more out there,” he said. “I heard voices in the night. I stayed as still as possible.”

So it went, throughout the day and into the night and into the morning. Then he heard the footsteps returning, the flaps being pulled back--the ones that had been his shield.

Mathews heard a voice asking someone to check his pulse, but kept his eyes closed anyway.

“I was playing possum,” he said.

The hand touched his neck and Mathews opened his eyes. There before him was John Chapman, a Killeen policeman he had known for years.

“When I saw him, I knew I was safe,” said Mathews. “I said: ‘I’m awfully glad to see you, Officer Chapman.’ ”