As senior Tanya Bills laced up her cleats and ran through soccer drills on January 15, she did not know that her practice would get cut short in the worst way. Gunshots. “We were scrimaging on the Del Oro football field and we heard two shots” Tanya said. “At first, we thought people were just hunting or something.”

As Tanya would soon learn, these shots were not for sport. They came from the gun of a murderer, who about an hour prior to the loomis shots had killed 93 year old Mary Toste by firing from his truck in Penryn. He had made his way to Loomis and then Roseville, shooting another man and police dog on his way.

“A police man came to our field and told our coach that he had to get all of us out quickly. We had to grab all of our stuff and run to our cars, and he told us that if we saw a man with a gun to just keep driving. We had younger kids at our practice, so we had to make sure that they got in our cars because their parents weren’t there yet. I had three girls in my car, and they were all crying. I took them to Safeway and we went in and got food and called their parents to make sure they knew what was happening,” said Tanya.

Fortunately, Tanya and the three girls as well as everyone on her team got home safe. The unnamed shooter got into a car crash on westbound Interstate 80 and Highway 65, and was found on a nearby off ramp where he was shot and killed by officers.

With numerous crime scenes around placer county as well as police forces from Roseville, Rocklin, and the CHP getting involved, this crime made for a chaotic one.

The three crying girls that Tanya drove to Safeway weren’t the only ones rattled by the event, as Tanya said, “I was kind of shaken up so I drove straight home and just got in bed.”

With so many shootings happening around the world, it is scary that one happened this close to home. Hopefully, these circumstances never happen again and Placer County can continue to be shooting-free.