The man who challenged a gunman at a Kroger store in Kentucky last week says it’s been “overwhelming” in the week following the brazen attack that left two people dead.
“Nowhere is safe, so that now just leaves me with always keeping my head on a swivel,” Dominiic Rozier told the Louisville Courier-Journal. “I cherish every day, especially with my kids and my wife.”
Dominiic Rozier apologized to anyone who was harmed or distressed as a result of his shootout with Kroger shooting suspect Gregory Bush. (Louisville Courier Journal / video screenshot)
On Oct. 24, Rozier and his wife, Kiera Rozier, were headed to the Kroger in Jeffersontown to finish purchasing snacks and supplies for their son’s birthday party when tragedy struck. As they approached the store’s entrance, the couple heard gunshots and were warned by a fleeing customer not to go inside.
It wasn’t long before a man, later identified as Gregory Bush, slowly exited the store and approached an elderly Black woman on her cellphone. Kiera Rozier, 26, recalled hearing the woman telling the person on the other end of the line how badly she needed to get home because “these people are shooting.”
What happened next made the couple stop in their tracks.
“[Bush] looked at her, and he kind of grinned, and he just shot her. That’s when I froze,” Kiera Rozier said.
On Wednesday, a Jefferson County grand jury indicted the suspect on two counts of murder for the killings of Vicke Lee Jones, 60, and Maurice E. Stallard, 69, at the Kroger store that day. Bush was also slapped with two counts of first-degree wanton endangerment and an additional count of criminal attempted murder, according to the newspaper.
One week has passed and for the first time, the couple is detailing their chilling encounter with the gunman.
After witnessing Bush gun down Jones in front of the store, Kiera Rozier said her husband, a concealed carry permit holder, drew his own gun and confronted Bush. That’s when she says the shooter pointed his gun in her direction and at another woman in the parking lot.
A gun battle between the two men ensued with bullets grazing cars, shattering the window of a parked SUV. Neither of the men nor others were injured in the shoot out, police said.
“I was doing it to protect me and my wife,” Dominiic Dozier explained, though he apologized for any harm or distress his bullets might have caused bystanders.
“If I would have died … my wife would be burying me the next week, and then she would always have that to live with on our son’s birthday,” he continued. “That don’t sit well with me.”
Bush managed to make it to his car and fled the scene before being apprehended by cops a short time later. According to the indictment, authorities have charged him with attempted murder by “manifesting extreme indifference to human life” for firing at Dominiic Dozier.
Kiera Dozier called the entire ordeal “traumatizing.”
“To see that lady (Jones) fall that close to me … it’s just been a hard week for me to get back to my regular life,” she told the Courier Journal. “It just makes it hard to function, as if everything is normal.”
The couple said they’re aware both victims in the attack were African-American. State and federal authorities are now investigating the incident as a hate crime after it was revealed that moments before the shooting, Bush, a white man, had tried to enter a predominately Black church and told a bystander in the Kroger parking lot that “whites don’t kill whites.”
Keira Dozier shot down claims that Bush was mentally ill and incompetent at the time of his attack.
“If you go to a church before Kroger, if you have children of your own and you’re stable enough to get a gun, to drive, to talk, to function …,” she began. “He knew what he did.”
No charges are expected to be filed against Dozier.
Watch more in the clip below.
