Moments after the July 4 parade in Highland Park, Illinois, became a mass-shooting bloodbath on Monday morning, Tom Brooks’ son spotted two-year-old Aiden McCarthy from the top of a parking garage stairwell.
“He looks and is like, ‘Dad, there’s a boy there.’ I looked over and sure enough, there was a boy underneath” a man’s body, Brooks told The Daily Beast.
Police say 21-year-old Robert Crimo III rained gunfire on the peaceful celebration, killing seven people and injuring dozens more. But even as the country struggles to make sense of another mass killer easily accessing assault-style weapons and shooting people indiscriminately, it has been especially shaken by the McCarthy family’s story.
Two-year-old Aiden was effectively orphaned that day when his parents, 37-year-old Kevin and 35-year-old Irina, were killed. Aiden is now being cared for by his grandparents, Nina and Misha Levberg, neither of whom could be reached for comment for this story.
Brooks recalled that, along with his 19-year-old son and his girlfriend Lauren Silva, he was heading up from an underground parking garage in search of pancakes when shots erupted outside.
Brooks, who grew up in the city, went to take a peek from a stairwell that overlooked the scene. What he saw, he said, were bodies sprawled in the street.
Brooks’ initial reaction was to run with his son to safety. But when Morgan saw the child in danger, they sprang into action, he said.
“Everybody was gone,” besides the dead and injured, Brooks recalled.
Brooks and his son grabbed the little boy by his arms and pulled, but his legs were trapped under the body of the man they now understand to have been his father, Kevin, who was lying facedown on the ground with an arm around Aiden.
“You could just tell how he fell, how he landed, he was protecting his son. His back was towards the bullets,” Brooks told The Daily Beast.
Worried they would injure the boy if they kept tugging, the duo propped his father up slightly to free the toddler, who was covered in blood.
“I stood him up and I put him in my arm, and I kind of looked around,” Brooks said.
Morgan took off his shirt and tied it around McCarthy’s visible wound, frantically burying his knuckle into a bullet hole to try and stop the bleeding.
“Ten feet away is two more people that are just dead, blood all over them,” Brooks continued. “One was shot in the head…. they’re both, like, awkwardly laying on the stairs very, like, unnaturally.”
It was at this point that Brooks called over Silva to take charge of Aiden, he said.
“Go take this boy and go downstairs,” he recalled saying. “Don’t leave him, don’t leave him.”
After caring for the child for nearly 20 minutes, Silva passed him to another family with kids—who, in turn, helped reunite the boy with his surviving relatives.
“He kept asking if his mom and dad are going to come back soon,” Silva told the Beast.
Aiden has since emerged as a sort of face of the horrific shooting—and the recipient of an outpouring of generosity, including more than $2.5 million raised on GoFundMe in his name.
Brooks was struck by both the nightmare of the shooting itself and the realization that he knew the alleged shooter’s family—Robert Crimo II owned a convenience store he grew up going to. The two men went through a divorce at the same time, and were on a first-name basis, he said. Brooks called the patriarch a “nice guy” who was “always super friendly.”
But the message Brooks said was most on his mind since Monday’s events was that Kevin McCarthy died a hero.
“I want them [the public] to know that,” Brooks said.
He added, referring to the moments before an EMT took over in a vain attempt to save McCarthy’s life, “We talked to him and we told him his son was OK.”
George is Digismak’s reported cum editor with 13 years of experience in Journalism