Survivors testify as synogogue massacre trial enters third day

Shabbat (Sabbath) services had just begun at the Tree of Life’s Pervin chapel on the morning of Oct. 27, 2018, when Stephen Weiss heard a metallic bang and the crash of shattering glass.

“My first thought when I heard that was that the custodian dropped a tray of glasses,” he told a federal court jury on Thursday.

Two fellow congregants, Irving Younger and Cecil Rosenthal, left to help.

Both would soon be dead.

As Rabbi Jeffrey Myers finished a religious reading, Weiss got up and walked to the chapel doorway.

It was then that he realized what was happening — someone was shooting.

“I could see shell casings bouncing on the floor,” he said. “I could see them bounce across the floor directly in front of me.”

As a man familiar with guns, he knew them to be semiautomatic casings.

His peaceful place of worship was under armed assault.

He fled the chapel and headed downstairs to warn another small congregation, New Light, which was also holding services that morning.

“I was going to make sure that they left their worship space,” he said.

He eventually made it outside onto the street, where he told two responding police officers that someone was shooting inside. The officers ran to the front of the building and immediately came under fire; one officer took a round to the hand.

When the morning was done, 11 worshippers from three congregations were dead, all victims of a hate-filled killer wielding an AR-15.

Weiss’ testimony came on the third day of the federal death penalty trial of that man, Robert Bowers, a Baldwin truck driver.

His lawyers are not questioning that he did it. During testimony thus far, they aren’t even cross-examining the witnesses, allowing them to tell their stories and then politely thanking them.

Their only goal is to later in the trial convince a jury to spare Bowers’ life. The Justice Department is seeking his execution in the federal death chamber in Terre Haute, Ind.

Prosecutors say Bowers drove to the Tree of Life building from his home in Baldwin, seething with hatred for Jews. He parked outside in a handicapped spot, shot out the glass front doors and then rampaged inside against helpless congregants, most of them elderly. One was approaching 100.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Soo Song said he shot everyone he saw. He ended up murdering half the people in the building that day in the worst attack on Jews in U.S. history.

Killed were Bernice Simon, 84, and her husband, Sylvan Simon, 86; Jerry Rabinowitz, 66; David Rosenthal, 54, and his brother, Cecil, 59; Dan Stein, 71; Joyce Fienberg, 75; Irving Younger, 69; Melvin Wax, 87; Richard Gottfried, 65; and Rose Mallinger, 97.

After defense and prosecution spent a month picking a jury, the trial began Tuesday with testimony from survivors and the playing of 911 calls. That continued Wednesday.

Earlier on Thursday, Rabbi Jonathan Perlman of the New Light congregation, which held services on the lower level on Saturdays, recounted hearing gunfire and shattering glass upstairs.

“We’re in danger,” he said he told his congregants. “Follow me.”

He told everyone to get down and they crawled into a darkened storage area. One of the members, Melvin Wax, was hard of hearing. As they hid in the dark room, Perlman said Wax wanted to know what was happening.

“He said ‘’Whatever it is, it’s over,’” Perlman recalled. He saw as Wax moved to take a peek out the door.

Perlman told him not to look and to stay away from the door.

“He wouldn’t listen,” Perlman said.

Bowers shot Wax in the chest and killed him.

In later testimony, Audrey Glickman described her actions as she began to lead the Tree of Life congregation service and heard the same crash as the others and then shooting.

“The echoing of the machine gun fire was unmistakable,” she said.

Bowers’ weapon, an AR-15, is not a machine gun, but the shots came fast and loud as the sound resounded off a marble hallway.

She and her 90-year-old friend, Joe Charny, fled up the stairs and tried to get David Rosenthal, brother of Cecil, to go with them. Both brothers were developmentally challenged; everyone called them “the boys.” David was agitated, saying he had to call home, and wouldn’t leave. Bowers killed him.

As they made their escape, Glickman said, Charny told her that he had stood face to face with the gunman at the beginning of the attack.

She said he told her had looked into his “blue eyes” and down the barrel of his “big, long gun.” But Bowers didn’t shoot him. Charny got away.

He died this year of natural causes at age 95.

“He wanted to testify,“ Glickman said.

Pittsburgh police Officer Daniel Mead took the stand in late afternoon and described how Bowers shot him in the hand through the front door of the building. He said he had just arrived with his partner, hugged the walls for protection and then rounded a corner to see the shooter “posting up on me” 4 feet away inside the building.

“I could hear the shot, and I could see the muzzle flash,” he said.

A slug hit his left wrist and came out his hand. The hand went limp.

On police radio transmissions, jurors heard him screaming and swearing that he’d been shot. They also heard him yelling at another officer to “get in the ball game,” meaning get into the action and do something.

Mead has not been able to return to work as an officer.

Prosecutor Soo Song asked him why he had tried to enter the building that day.

“It’s what we do,” he said.

This story is part of ongoing coverage of the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting trial by the Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle and the Pittsburgh Union Progress in a collaboration supported by funding from the Pittsburgh Media Partnership.