Witness: Dollar General hostage ‘fell into my arms’

Gail Fogle stood outside her store about 8 a.m. Monday and watched the police officers, their guns drawn, yell at someone inside the neighboring Dollar General.

Fogle, manager of the NAPA Auto Parts store on Whyte Hardee Boulevard in Hardeeville, couldn’t make out what the officers were saying.

But she heard the gunshots clearly enough.

“Four or five,” her coworker, Luis Rosas, said Monday, a few hours after a masked gunman attempted to rob the Dollar General and took a clerk hostage.

“POP-POP-POP-POP-POP,” Rosas said. “Then nothing else.”

A brief lull before, as Fogle said, “it all went chaotic.”

The suspect has been identified as Raufael M. Bostick, 23, of Savannah, according to Jasper County Coroner Martin Sauls III. Bostick was killed in the shootout.

Jasper County Sheriff’s Office Deputy Dan Morgan, one of the first officers on the scene of the attempted armed robbery, was shot in the foot. He was “in good spirits” Monday afternoon, according to Jasper County Sheriff Gregory B. Jenkins. And Memorial University Medical Center in Savannah — where Morgan was treated, according to officials — said “a Daniel Morgan” had been discharged Monday.

The clerk, who sprinted over to the NAPA store shortly after the gunfire, was “all to pieces,” Fogle said.

She described a woman wearing the all-black uniform of a Dollar General employee running to her and collapsing in her arms.

“My main thing was to get her in a chair,” Fogle said, “because she was so upset — ”

“Shaky,” Rosas interjected.

“ — she was going to fall,” Fogle continued. “Because when she fell in my arms, I thought I was going to drop her because my knees just buckled. It was nerve-wracking.”

Thornton Butler, whose Butler’s Service Center auto shop and gas station sits across the street from the NAPA and the Dollar General, saw the clerk run Fogle’s way. He didn’t hear the gunshots, he said, but his security cameras recorded the moment that forced the clerk into the store. He said the footage showed someone sneaking around the south corner of the building, pausing near the stand of trees that divides the Dollar General from the NAPA store, and then bolting for the front door.

The footage, he said, has been turned over to investigators.

The South Carolina Law Enforcement Division is investigating the incident, according to Hardeeville Chief of Police Sam Woodward. He confirmed the shootout occurred inside the Dollar General and involved one suspect and three law enforcement officers — two Hardeeville Police Department officers and Morgan.

Sauls said he could not say how many times Bostick was shot but that he died from a gunshot. An autospy is forthcoming.

Woodward declined to comment on who shot first and how many shots were fired because of the ongoing investigation.

He estimated eight of his officers responded to the incident, and Jenkins said roughly “eight or nine” of his deputies arrived on scene.

Morgan has been with the sheriff’s office for about two years, Jenkins said. Prior to that, he was chief of Hardeeville’s fire department, a post he left in March 2014, according to Hardeeville City Clerk Lori Pomarico.

Pomarico said Morgan began working for the city in April 1997.

On Monday morning, when the clerk sprinted to the NAPA store, Fogle took her inside “out of the sun” and sat her down in the store’s back office. She gave the clerk some water, and she put cold water on a washcloth so the woman could wipe her face.

“The only words that she said were, ‘They shot him in my store,’ ” Rosas said.

“Yeah, ‘They shot him in my store,’ ” Fogle said.

“That’s it,” Rosas said, “and she just — ”

“I know she told me, when she heard the first shot, she hit the floor,” Fogle said. “And then I guess they let her out or told her to get out and she came running this way, and she was just a nervous wreck. She was all to pieces.

“And I was all to pieces myself.”

This story was originally published June 20, 2016 at 11:24 AM with the headline "Witness: Dollar General hostage ‘fell into my arms’."