Glendon Oakley : Meet the hero soldier who saved children during the shooting in El Paso, Texas

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22-year-old Army automated logistics specialist, Glendon Oakley, had been shopping at a sporting goods store inside the Cielo Vista Mall in El Paso when a child burst into the store shouting about an active shooter at the nearby Walmart.

“The guy at the register and I sort of looked at each other,” Oakley told Task & Purpose. “He’s a little kid … are you going to believe him?”

Glendon Oakley sprang into action

When Oakley exited the store minutes later and headed to Footlocker next door, he finally heard the sound of gunfire echoing across the mall. He immediately pulled the Glock 9mm he occasionally carries under Texas’s concealed carry laws. While he had just returned from an incident-free deployment to Kuwait, this was not his first firefight.

“That’s what you do,” he told Task & Purpose. “You pull your gun, you find cover, and you figure out what to do next.”

A group of a dozen children gathered in one of the mall’s open play areas, screaming for their parents. Oakley says he tried to get fleeing bystanders to help, but none would stop.

He started grabbing kids

“I didn’t even think. I just grabbed as many kids as I could and ran five stores down to the exit,” he said.

“I heard four kids died,” he said, his voice softening. “I wish I could have gotten more kids out of there. I wish those guys who ran would have stayed … I just think, what if that was my child? How would I want some other man to react?”

Twenty people were killed, and dozens more injured after a gunman entered a Walmart in El Paso and opened fired on customers stocking up on back-to-school goods, at about 10:30 a.m. on Saturday.

The mass shooting came less than 15 hours before another gunman killed nine people and wounded more than two dozen more in a popular business district in Dayton, Ohio.

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