By Kelli Smith
The Dallas Morning News
DALLAS — One person was killed and seven others were injured when a shooter opened fire early Saturday inside a crowded northwest Dallas nightclub, police said.
Police were called about 1:30 a.m. to Pryme Bar just south of Northwest Highway and between Interstate 35E and Loop 12, and found eight people shot — four men and four women, all in their 20s, police said.
Officers determined that a disturbance broke out between two groups inside, and after a witness tried to intervene the shooter pulled out a gun and began firing.
The gunman, who was described as a Black man in his early 20s with dreads and a blue shirt with a hat and jacket, is at large, police said.
All eight victims were taken to local hospitals. Daisy Navarrete, 21, of Plano died at the hospital, while conditions of the seven others ranged from good to critical, police said.
Navarrete had just turned 21 on Monday and was full of life, said her mother, Judith Gonzalez, also of Plano. She was born and raised in Plano and worked at FedEx, but hoped to one day go to nursing school.
“She was a beautiful, happy girl,” Gonzalez said. “She had a lot to live for. But not anymore because now she’s gone.
“This has been very, very hard,” she added. “We need the police to get the person that did this. This cannot be left like this.”
Gonzalez said Navarrete went to the club “just to have fun.” She said it was the nightclub’s responsibility to make sure the environment was safe inside, and she expressed anger at police and Pryme Bar for not taking steps to prevent the violence.
“How did a person get in there with a gun?” Gonzalez said. “The police needs to look at all those details. If they were more careful, we won’t be going through all this nightmare.”
Piles of blood-stained rags and clothes, shards of glass and bottles of alcohol were still scattered around the two-story club later Saturday morning. A light pink heel that employees said belonged to one of the victims still sat near the entrance by a pile of stained clothing.
It had been a busy Friday night with hundreds of partygoers, many of them young women, when the shooting erupted, staff members said.
“There was a lot of mayhem,” said employee Jeromy Skinner, who was at the club overnight and came back early Saturday to help clean up.
Skinner said he was near the back of the club when the shooter walked in through a side door and came to blows with another man near the front. The two fought near the entrance, then about nine to 12 shots rang out, Skinner said. The music was cut off and people started frantically shoving one another in a scramble to get out the back doors.
“If anything it’s weird that I’m alive because I saw a lady get shot,“ Skinner said, adding that was the moment he thought “this is real.”
Police arrived within minutes, Skinner said. He said he remembers one woman who was shot stumbling toward the bathroom before telling him, “Please help me, I don’t want to die alone.”
“That’s going to kill me the rest of my life,” Skinner said. “I was just like ‘damn.’”
Skinner said that employees were devastated by the shooting and that he couldn’t sleep after getting home about 5:30 a.m.
Greg Adams, 41, was one of two people cleaning outside the bar Saturday morning. He said that he was outside the building when the shooting happened and that he saw hundreds of people pile out of the back entrances and out of nearby businesses.
Adams said he saw one officer pick up a woman who’d been shot in or near her leg and sprint toward an ambulance.
“It was pandemonium,” Adams said, adding that he noticed a pool of blood dripping out of a side door as police officers poured onto the scene.
Skinner said the shooting at Pryme Bar wasn’t the first violent incident at the club, though he called it the worst he’s seen recently.
Saturday’s bloodshed follows the fatal shooting of a man early Monday in the parking lot of XTC Cabaret, a nightclub on Stemmons Freeway, near Regal Row and Harry Hines Boulevard and not far from Pryme Bar.
In that case, Gregory Chandler was shot multiple times and pronounced dead at the scene. David McMillian, 43, was arrested on a murder charge and remained in the Dallas County jail in lieu of $1 million bail.
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