On April 26, 1979, a mass shooting took place during the annual Fiesta events at the Battle of Flowers Parade in San Antonio, Texas.

The day before, 64-year-old Ira Attebury,  known as “Garlic Boy,” due to body smell, walked into Bexar Savings at McCreless Mall to add a relative’s name to two accounts he owned, totaling $20,000.

Area mental health workers knew him as a paranoid World War II veteran, addicted to PCP, who had at one time been cared for at a local mental hospital.

From the mall, he drove his motor home, loaded with guns and ammunition, to the corner of Broadway and East Grayson Street, parking in front of Burggraf Tire Co., and sitting there throughout the night, awaiting the parade crowds.

This is a brief version of what my family experienced on the day of the parade:

I was driving the Monorail Train on this very hot sunny day at nearby Hemisfair Plaza, site of the 1968 World’s Fair.

As I returned the train to the main station platform, a server from the nearby Phillippine Restaurant came running up the stairs to me crying.

“Your father has been shot and your mother is dead!” she screamed.

In disbelief and shock, I needed verification. I ran to the Park’s headquarters and watched KENS TV5 live coverage of the Broadway St./Grayson St. shooting.

Our family often joined with other police officer’s families and would historically park pickup trucks on the street corner there with lawn chairs and snacks to watch the parade as my dad and other police would be stationed at that location.

My sister, (Bobbi Dennis Shipman) and I were adults by this time, both working so we didn’t do this anymore.

Our Mom and my wife (at the time) were sitting in bleachers, under the shade from the highway above them, on Broadway near the scene.

A Hemisfair Plaza ranger drove me to the San Antonio Police Department Headquarters on Nueva St.

As a teen, I had delivered newspapers downtown, including many each day to the police station. That, and being known by some officers as a private investigator, allowed me easy access into the building. 

Upstairs, I saw policemen coming back from the shootings. One officer, who I believed to be Tommy Cavazos, was shook up and said “I shot him.” The door to that office was quickly shut to prevent some of us in the hallway from observing more.

A police detective that I knew said he would take me to find my father when they confirmed that a policeman’s wife had been shot.

He drove us to the edge of the crime scene. Another policeman told us he believed our father was stationed at the corner of Santa Rosa Hospital this particular year. This was unusual as it was near the end of the parade route.

Sure enough, that’s where Dad was, waiting for the parade to show up. He was startled because the police and crowds had no knowledge of the shootings but realized it was way behind schedule.

When I told him about Mom and my wife, he was in shock!

“Wait a minute, are you sure?”

The policeman I was with confirmed multiple victims, including an officer’s wife.

Dad took off running towards the police station.

(I laugh now, as I write this 45-years later. Our father was a bit of a track star at Harlandale High School in the 1950s and placed second in a state event. I had seen him run often, especially as the baseball coach on my Little League team for a few years in the mid-60s. But I had never witnessed him running this fast!)

We drove next to him and Dad jumped in the back seat to return to the police station.

After about half an hour, we went home to see if our mom might, by some chance, be there. Of course, there were no cellphones back then.

Mom was indeed home and I ran to hug her, relieved she was not a victim. In a panic, they had left and returned home. She had been desperately calling hospitals all over town to find out if  Dad had been injured.

Since then, I have only attended just a few such parades, but that was from the second floor of a building across from the Alamo, when I lived nearby above the Majestic Theater downtown for about six years.

Police Lt. Gary Nagy, who was at the intersection, was shot in the legs and chest.  He began crawling across the pavement.

Behind him, his wife had been shot in the chest, his daughter in the leg, and his son in the foot. A patrol officer dragged him to cover behind a nearby Jeep. Another carried Nagy’s kids to safety. His wife, who was a nurse, ran amongst the officers, pellets in her own chest, spraying antiseptic on their wounds. 

I have thought about the Nagy family over the years because our Mom, little sister and I had historically enjoyed the parade from that vantage point as we joined others whose police officer fathers secured that  intersection area for previous years.

Of course, the Phillippine Restaurant server had only good intentions, despite her language misinterpretation, when she heard a police officer was shot and his wife had been killed. Thankfully, the Nagy family recovered.

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IN GOD WE TRUST

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