'I'm a walking miracle right now,' Friends, grazed by bullets, survive Gilroy Garlic Festival shooting

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ByKate Larsen KGO logo
Tuesday, July 30, 2019
Friends, grazed by bullets, survive Gilroy Garlic Festival shooting
Best friends, Nick McFarland and Justin Bates, went to the Gilroy Garlic Festival on Sunday expecting a fun day, and instead witnessed a gunman open fire into a crowd of innocent people.

GILROY, Calif. (KGO) -- Best friends, Nick McFarland and Justin Bates, went to the Gilroy Garlic Festival on Sunday expecting a fun day, and instead witnessed a gunman open fire into a crowd of innocent people.

"We all could have died yesterday, we all could have died," said McFarland. "It was like a military-grade guy coming to do some damage."

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The crowd included their group of friends and family.

"The doctor said five to seven different bullets grazed me," said Bates, who was hit when he jumped on top of McFarland's girlfriend, Sarah Ordaz, to protect her from the onslaught of gunfire near her family's booth at the festival.

"My guardian angels, protecting us," said Ordaz.

"I'm a walking miracle right now. I don't know how I'm alive," said Bates, who pointed to graze wounds on his upper body. "The doctor told me these two ones up here that grazed my shoulder, if they were an inch to the right, they would have gone into my lungs and they would have been fatal."

McFarland was also hit.

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"The bullet shatterings went all into my leg."

A nurse and good samaritan helped McFarland at the fairgrounds and rushed him to the hospital, where he was treated and released to his friends. "By the grace of God, I have come face to face with a gunman with half my family there, and we all walked away alive."

Get the latest on the deadly Gilroy Garlic Festival shooting here.