A Gunman Drove Through a Fence Into a Citibank Lunch Crowd With a Rifle — Then One Security Guard Stood Between Him and 3,200 Workers

It was lunchtime on a sunny Wednesday in Florida, and the tables outside one of Citibank’s biggest offices were full.

Adara Evans, a Citi analyst, was eating with her coworkers in the courtyard of the bank’s sprawling Sabal Center campus, just east of Tampa. Then came a loud bang. She looked up and saw a sedan smash through a fence and plow straight into the tables where people were sitting, she told the Tampa Bay Times.

It was 12:11 p.m. on November 4. Within moments, the 911 lines at the Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office began to light up, and the car’s driver was climbing out with a rifle in his hands.

What happened over the next few minutes left one woman dead, four people in the hospital and more than 3,200 workers running for their lives. According to the sheriff, it could have been far worse. The attacker, he said, was “intent on killing as many people as possible.” The reason he didn’t was standing inside the building.

The Car That Came Through the Fence

Investigators have pieced together the gunman’s route in chilling detail. He drove a small silver four-door sedan onto the office park off Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, near Interstate 75, and kept going where cars aren’t meant to go: over several medians, across a stretch of grass and through a secured fence, Chief Deputy Frank Losat said at a press briefing.

The car came to rest in the middle of an outdoor seating area where, in Losat’s words, “multiple individuals were having lunch.”

“Upon the car coming to rest, the suspect exits the vehicle with a rifle, approaches the female, and she is shot,” Losat said.

Video shot by people on the campus and described by the New York Post showed a heavyset man in a dark jacket with no shirt underneath, carrying what appeared to be an AR-style rifle. WFLA reported he was also armed with a handgun.

The woman he shot died at the scene. She has not been publicly named while her family is notified. Citi CEO Jane Fraser said in a message to staff that she was a Citi employee, ABC News reported, while law enforcement sources told the New York Post she worked for a vendor on the site.

“I Can Still Hear the Particular Type of Scream”

David Dzien, a Citibank vice president, was walking back to work after lunch when he saw the sedan crash through the fence about 150 yards away. What followed, he told the Associated Press, was an “incredible clatter” that he only later realized was gunfire.

The crowd near the car broke apart. People began to scream. Dzien sprinted back into the building and got out through a fire escape.

“I can still hear the particular type of scream,” he said, “and I’m still trying to process it, frankly.”

Evans ran inside too, but her first thought wasn’t her own safety. Her sister worked in another building on the same campus. The two have since found each other, safe.

Cherron Martin, another employee, was inside the cafeteria at a town hall meeting when she heard a loud crash and saw the man step out of his car. Someone shouted that he had guns, she said, and she ran for a parking garage.

The gunman, investigators say, was moving toward that same cafeteria.

The Man Who Was Already Inside

By the time the gunman reached the cafeteria, someone was there to meet him.

An armed security guard employed by Citibank confronted him inside, around 12:15 p.m., according to the sheriff’s office. The two men traded gunfire. The gunman went down.

“The security guard that’s employed by Citibank stopped the threat,” Losat said. “Was there a potential for further violence? Absolutely. So, kudos to that security guard.”

The first marked deputy had pulled up just one minute after the first 911 call, and deputies went straight into the building. On newly released body camera footage, one deputy can be heard asking bystanders for a description, then reporting that a car had crashed onto the property and that the suspect was in the cafeteria. Moments later, an officer’s voice comes over the chaos: “Shooter is down.”

The gunman was rushed out at 12:24 p.m. and pronounced dead at Tampa General Hospital at 1:12 p.m., the sheriff’s office said in a statement Wednesday night.

“This was a tragic situation where a victim was killed by an individual who was intent on killing as many people as possible,” Sheriff Chad Chronister said. “Thanks to the brave actions by the security team on-site and more than 365 deputies, this unhinged suspect was stopped before he could harm anyone else.”

The guard’s name has not been released.

367 Deputies, Six Buildings and a Hotel Full of Strangers

Even with the shooter down, nobody knew yet whether he had been alone. A total of 367 sheriff’s deputies poured onto the campus, joined by SWAT teams, aviation, drone and K9 units and federal partners, more than 400 law enforcement officers in all. They went room by room through the office buildings, including locked rooms, and spent more than two hours clearing them.

Four other people were taken to a hospital with injuries that were not life-threatening. Investigators said on Wednesday they did not yet know whether those people were hurt by gunfire, by the car or in the rush to escape.

A few hundred feet away, the Sheraton Tampa Brandon Hotel was in the middle of its monthly staff luncheon when a flood of police vehicles raced past toward the campus. Then Citibank workers started running through the doors, telling the front desk there was an active shooter.

“We at first locked the doors and, you know, went into lockdown, but the employees kept coming over,” general manager Matt Chauvin told the AP. By his estimate, the hotel took in about 300 Citi workers that afternoon. Staff handed out water and lunch and opened up hotel rooms so people could “sort of decompress or make phone calls.”

The Question Nobody Can Answer Yet

What investigators still can’t say is why.

Sheriff Chronister first described the shooting as a “targeted incident.” Later, Losat said detectives were still working to establish whether the gunman and the woman he killed had ever known each other. Sources told ABC News that the suspect may have had a financial grievance, and that investigators were looking into whether it was tied to the bank. Neither the gunman nor the victim had been publicly identified as of Thursday.

Citi has moved to reassure its workforce. “The Tampa campus is secure, and we are adding additional security to all of our other sites as necessary,” Fraser told employees.

The sheriff’s office is asking anyone with video of the attack to send it to videos@teamhcso.com, and with 3,200 people on campus that day, there may be a lot of it.

Somewhere in that footage is the moment a lunch break became a crime scene, and the moment, minutes later, when one guard in a cafeteria made sure it went no further. One woman never made it back from those tables. Because of him, everyone else who ran from them on Wednesday did.