‘We’re hiding. We’re here.’ This tour guide saved dozens in Twin Falls shooting
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Mark Dee, Idaho Statesman
TWIN FALLS (Idaho Statesman) — On the day it all changed, Gabrielle Burton was where she often is on Saturday afternoons — the Twin Falls Visitor Center.
Burton runs a tour company, one of the few operating in Idaho’s Magic Valley. Her trip on Aug. 1 was a busload of her “super-seniors,” ages 75 and up. The itinerary was low-key: Peer down the concrete overlook into the Snake River Canyon, and cool off with a shopping spree in the visitor center gift shop, stocked full of Evel Knievel T-shirts and southern Idaho souvenirs.
It seemed like they’d timed it perfectly, too, their yellow coach bus parking out front in time to see a BASE jumper leap from the Perrine Bridge, circling and drifting on the wind toward the deep green river below.
Inside the window-walled building by the canyon rim, no one could hear the first rounds being fired into the drive-thru at the In-N-Out Burger less than 500 feet away. The clock was about to turn to 2:30 p.m.
Local police would come to call Burton, 61, a hero for what she did in the minutes and hours ahead. She, herself, struggles with the title. But thanks to Burton, some three dozen people are safe, despite coming feet and seconds away from the gunman who killed three people and wounded seven others during a mass shooting in Twin Falls on Saturday, Aug. 1.
“What was the choice?” she told the Idaho Statesman on Aug. 13. “If I didn’t do what I did, we’d all have gotten shot. There was no choice.”
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‘We’re hiding. We’re here.’
When the first of her guests thought they heard gunfire, Burton dismissed the noise as fireworks. Then she opened the visitor center door and noticed the rapid “pop-pop-pop” riding the wind down toward the canyon. The sounds grew louder, closer, she remembers, culminating in the “pow” of a rifle blast.
Burton didn’t know what was going on. It sounded like a shootout in the parking lot, right by her tour’s waiting bus. Some of her guests were looking at the flowers out front. Burton hastened them inside, pushed everyone — her own tour plus a dozen or so others — away from the floor-to-ceiling bank of windows that look out at the canyon. Burton ducked behind the gift shop counter with two teenage employees. She’d gotten to know them during their summer job, she said, and she told them to stay down.
Burton stood up just long enough to see a man in black walking toward the building. He had a rifle across his chest, and, by the time she realized what she was looking at, he was just five stairs away from the front door.
“This is really happening,” she remembers thinking. “He looked like every shooter you see on TV. Exactly. It was so surreal.”
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From then on, it was instinct. In her work, Burton is used to communicating to large groups. She looked at the two employees, both high schoolers, and snapped off orders.
“Get everybody in the back! Get everybody in the back!”
The teenagers knew exactly what she meant: a narrow hallway, a locked door leading to a small clutch of offices on the building’s west side. Outside, the shooter climbed the first step.
That evening, Twin Falls Chamber of Commerce CEO Kyle Tarbet watched security tapes alongside police. He told the Statesman that there were about three dozen people scattered around the visitor center when the shooter reached the front stairs. By the time he opened the translucent door, “it was a ghost town,” Tarbet said.
“She didn’t wait, she didn’t hesitate,” Tarbet said of Burton, with whom he regularly works. “It’s just kind of her personality. She’s full of energy. She’s a take-charge kind of person, and she took action.”
Burton and the two employees ushered almost everyone into the back hall. The whole time, Burton said, she waited to feel the punch of a bullet pierce her back. She was one of the last to get inside, where she told everyone to lie down and stay silent.
“I had to be the one,” Burton said on Thursday, though she had no training in active shooter scenarios. In a room full of tourists, “there was no one else who could get these people to safety.”
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For more than a week, she didn’t know what happened outside the wood-grained door. Inside, they huddled atop each other, carpeting the floor in silence, and waiting for the shots.
Video later released by police showed the shooter walking inside and scanning the open gift shop. Three people didn’t make it into the hallway. Two hid behind a drink refrigerator by the entrance, maybe six feet away from the gunman’s barrel. Another hid in the corner, shielded by a display stagecoach, part of the visitor center’s historic exhibit. The gunman was standing on the same spot where, 20 seconds earlier, Burton had stood, ushering visitors to safety, Tarbet told the Statesman.
“He looked around and there were no people,” Tarbet said, recalling the tape.
The shooter walked by the stagecoach, stepping past the person hiding there. It was a “miracle” that he didn’t see anyone, Tarbet said. At the back wall, he glanced around before spotting an emergency exit on the north wall and exiting onto the Canyon Rim Trail.
Soon after, Burton looked out the window to see the man with the rifle running west up the path. She didn’t know if he’d even come inside. More than a week later, she watched the footage with her family and realized that she and the shooter likely had stood on the same tile.
Police ran by the window, long guns in hand. Burton instructed her group to stay down and stay quiet — no one knew what was happening. Two elderly guests went into shock, she said, as she tried to get through to 911.
Eventually, she got through to dispatch.
“I’ve got 30 people,” she remembers telling them. “We’re in the back. We’re hiding. We’re here.”
Twin Falls sheriff: Burton ‘undoubtedly saved lives’
Burton’s view of her world shifted on the ground in that hallway.
She doesn’t want to share any more details about where her people hid. She’s worried about a copycat, she said. Today, she doesn’t look at places the same way she did before 2:30 p.m. on Aug. 1. When she enters a room she looks for exits, for cover. Just in case.
Burton is still working to make sense of what she’d done.
Others realized right away.
Burton and her hideaways stayed with police for about five hours, moving from the visitor center to the county courthouse, where they were interviewed by police. Around 7:30 p.m., a City Council member asked her if she needed a ride. Burton remembered that her car was 3 miles away.
Four others joined them on the ride back down Blue Lakes Boulevard — a young couple and their parents, Burton said. They weren’t part of their tour, but she recognized them from the hallway.
“You saved our lives,” the young woman said.
“What do you mean?” Burton asked.
She’d meant exactly what she’d said. They weren’t part of the tour. They were charging their Tesla nearby when they saw the group, and decided to follow along, listen to Burton, and learn a thing or two. It was a rare thing, they said, to leave the car while it charged. A few minutes later, the gunman would jog into the corner of the parking lot where vehicles charged and shoot three people through their windshields. One, Dale Schultz of Salt Lake City, died from his wounds. Now, Burton was riding through town with four others who seemed sure that, on any other day, they’d have been shot, too.
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Burton drove home in the early August dusk. She didn’t know what she’d later learn — about the shooter, the victims and her part of the whole thing. On the drive, she just thanked God.
“Thank you, God,” she thought. “Thank you, God. Thank you, God, for being the one who was there to help these people. Thank you, God, for knowing what to do. Thank you, God, for not letting me get shot.”
At home, she wandered around her house and did nothing.
“What do you do, you know?” she said. “I lived.”
In the days that followed, Burton stayed home from work. Her efforts earned praise from both Twin Falls Police Chief Matthew Hicks and Twin Falls Sheriff Jack Johnson.
She “undoubtedly saved lives,” Johnson told the Statesman last week.
“It really didn’t even occur to me,” Burton said. “You can’t process what happened. It took me a while to even think about it.”
‘Just be brave, and make it happen.’
In phone calls with the Statesman since the shooting, Burton made it clear that she is still working through what happened on Aug. 1.
On Monday, she decided to watch footage with her family — her children and her 15-year-old grandson. They’d discussed it, whether the teenager should watch, and decided that he should. He needed to learn, they said.
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“I would hope that parents would not hide their children from this,” she said. “It’s a terrible thing. No one wants to show this to a 12-year-old, or even a teenager. But look what happened. …
“It’s too late to hide your children from what’s going on in this world.”
On Aug. 1, Burton learned that she was “strong” in ways she would never have known. She wants to help others be prepared, too. Know where you are. Know what’s around you. Listen — and try as hard as you can not to panic.
“I’m a big advocate for self-protection, because I was standing there with nothing,” she said. “I was standing in front of a gunman with nothing. And that was the worst position to be in.
“I’d like to see this community be as prepared as possible. I’d like to see people have real talks with kids, and real talks with employees,” she said. “Because life is different in Twin Falls now.”
Burton said she’s talked to city officials about preparation. If anyone could learn anything from her example, she said, she wants to help. If anyone just wants to talk, she said, she’ll be there for the conversation.
Burton has started doing tours again. Now, people recognize the landmarks of Twin Falls for new reasons than a few weeks ago. And, they’re starting to recognize her. If they ask, she tells them what she did, and reminds them that anyone can do the same: think clearly, make a plan, act decisively and get people to safety.
“I’m going to turn this terrible event into a positive as best I can for this community,” she said. “I hope my story helps people be brave. You cannot be afraid. Just be brave, and make it happen.”
