When gunshots rang out at a Twin Falls In-N-Out, Jordan Salinas shot back
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Mark Dee, Idaho Statesman
TWIN FALLS (Idaho Statesman) — Jordan Salinas and his girlfriend had planned a quiet Saturday, starting with horseback riding in Hagerman, safely out of cellphone range. They’d stop for lunch in Twin Falls, he thought, then hit the highway west.
All was going according to plan; Salinas pulled into the In-N-Out Burger off of Blue Lakes around 2:30 p.m. Chaos followed as he saw scores of people fleeing through the doors. He figured it was a kitchen fire. And then he heard the “pop-pop-pop” of gunfire.
Salinas ran toward it — an “automatic” response, “mechanical,” he’d say later. The last thing he remembers hearing was his girlfriend shouting his name — “Jordan!” — and then the shooting started again.
The 35-year-old from Kimberly had unwittingly rolled into a mass shooting that would leave three victims dead and at least seven others wounded on the edge of the Snake River Gorge.
And did what he could to stop it.
Salinas reached for his shoulder holster and drew an FN Five-Seven — a semi-automatic pistol with a suppressor fixed to the barrel. He worked through the framework he’d practiced for years. Salinas is a healthcare worker, the full-time caregiver of his wheelchair-bound brother. He began training seriously after a 2021 shooting at the Boise Towne Square Mall killed two shoppers and injured four more. Gunmen, he said, went after “soft targets.” A person in a wheelchair — and the aide at his side — would be as soft as they come, he reasoned.
He started taking his training seriously that day, he told the Idaho Statesman. He shoots on weekends and trains in the desert outside of Eden, a small town in eastern Jerome County. He’d never pointed his gun at so much as an animal, and never thought he’d need to use anything he practiced. Yet he drilled the four-step approach, borrowed from the military, every week, always the same:
Observe. Salinas ran from the car, gun drawn. Video posted to social media shows a man slinking behind In-N-Out signs and shrubs, seeking out the source of the gunfire.
Orient. Hidden from view, he established sight lines. He reminded himself to stay disciplined on the trigger. Soon, he saw a man, who the police later identified as 24-year-old Chad Williams, standing by the drive-through window. He watched as Williams lifted a rifle to his shoulder and fired toward cars.
Decide. “Ok,” Salinas thought. “This is the guy.”
Act. He leveled his pistol with both hands, and fired.
“He did not like it when bullets started firing both ways,” Salinas said on Sunday morning.
Salinas says he felt “no fear” — before, during or after firing. He had four steps to remember, and he followed them one at a time.
“There’s a task that needs to be done, and we’re the ones who need to do it,” he said.
Williams, Salinas said, seemed shocked. He was taking fire from two people: Salinas and an off-duty policeman, a customer at In-N-Out, who returned fire, too, according to Twin Falls County Sheriff Jack Johnson.
The return fire drove the shooter from the drive-through, toward an open parking lot at the city’s visitor center. Williams later died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound, Twin Falls Police Chief Matthew Hicks said Sunday.
“These people are true heroes in our community,” Johnson said of Salinas and the other man who returned fire. “They diverted the shooter and without a doubt saved many lives.”
Salinas’ part in the shootout took two or three minutes, he said. As Williams retreated, sirens shrieked down Blue Lakes. When police spilled into the plaza, Salinas stood down and let them go to work.
“My part,” he thought, “is done.”
Law enforcement declined to answer questions from the press on Sunday. Johnson would not confirm that Salinas was the civilian that shot back. Neither would spokesman for the Twin Falls Police Department and the city of Twin Falls. But at his regular coffee shop Sunday, his drinks were on the house. Friends and strangers shook Salinas’ hand.
A customer overheard, and opened his computer to a meme, one of many social media posts with Salinas name and likeness that had circulated overnight. It showed Salinas’ bearded silhouette black against the yellow of a Gadsden Flag, pistol pointed across the screen. Someone had replaced his ball cap with a Stetson. Underneath, they’d printed: “Idaho shoots back.”
“My buddies are over at Sportsman’s buying ammo because of you,” one said. They joked that the price of a five-seven was bound to rise, as often as the video of Salinas firing circled on social media. Then, Salinas’ face stiffened.
“Everyone says, ‘It’s not going to happen here,’” he said. “But what if it does?”
Soon, Salinas and his girlfriend were back in their car. They had plans, a day delayed: head west to Hagerman, out of cellphone service, where he hoped his phone would stop buzzing in his pocket. His horses, and a quiet Sunday, were waiting down the road.