Receptionist Recounts Face-to-Face Encounter With Gunman

Isabelle Shalometh was returning to her reception desk to help the burly, balding man who had walked into the North Valley Jewish Community Center.

She had just made eye contact, was leaning forward to ask how she could help him, when she saw him pull out a gun and begin shooting.

In her first interview since Buford O. Furrow Jr. allegedly walked into the community center Tuesday morning and sprayed gunfire that struck her, three young boys and a teenage camp counselor, Shalometh described what happened.

The man started to the right, fanning his gunfire in a semicircle down the hallway, across her desk and down the hallway to the left. And then he was gone.

Anyone who got hit was in that hallway, she said.

“I was just lucky he started shooting the way he did and I dropped,” said Shalometh, 68, recovering at her Granada Hills home Friday. “He literally walked in, did his thing, and he was out.”

It was so fast. Just seconds.

James Zidell, 6, had just come out of a classroom to get a drink of water, Shalometh recalled. Mindy Finkelstein was running across the hall to get to a classroom for safety. She didn’t know where the other victims had been.

As she dropped to dodge the bullets, one passed through herupper left arm. Another passed through her lower back, just inches from her spine. Both were clean wounds, with no bullet fragments. Just four holes.

She crawled around the corner into the back office, where her colleague Linda Snider worked. Snider tried to call 911 but was put on hold.

Then the phones went dead.

The jackhammer staccato of the gun had stopped. Shalometh crawled across the hall to her boss’ office, grabbed the phone and tried to call her husband at home.

“Honey, it’s me,” she told the answering machine. “Just get here. Don’t ask any questions.”

She was most worried about the classroom at the end of the hall. It overlooked the playground and was exposed. It was full of 3- and 4-year-olds, plus a mother and her two children, who had just come in to sign up for nursery school.

“It had big windows,” Shalometh said. “If he had gone out he could have shot all the kids through the windows.”

Shalometh couldn’t feel anything. By this time, she said, she knew she was shot. She could see the blood from her arm, and she could feel that her shirt was saturated.

She knocked on the door of the classroom with the big windows where Sandy Grofsky taught and asked Grofsky to step outside.

Grofsky told her to come in, where it was safe. Shalometh refused.

“I pulled the teacher out to the door so I didn’t scare the kids with the blood,” she said. She told Grofsky to keep her children down, below the level of the window.

Shalometh’s daughter, Lucille Goldin, considers her mother a hero.

“There’s a lot of people who would have stayed down on the floor, frozen and scared,” Goldin said. “But she got up.”

Reflecting Friday afternoon, Shalometh expressed relief that Furrow came on a Tuesday in August rather than at another time. If it had been a Monday, the front hall would have been filled with senior citizens. If it had been a Friday, the halls would have been teeming with children. And the staff was a skeleton crew, with lots of people on vacation.

“In a sick way, we were really lucky,” Goldin said.