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The last of the six men to enter the store, at approximately 1:32 P.M., described as a “black male, approximately six feet tall, thirty years of age, and weighing approximately one hundred seventy-five pounds,” was wearing a “dark blue, waist-length woolen jacket similar in appearance to the U.S. Navy pea coat.”
Immediately upon entering Goldblatt & Sons, this suspect, subsequently identified as Kenneth H. Dome, aka “King,” aka Hussein El Baruca, turned and began to bolt the door shut.
“Hey, friend,” Red Monahan asked as he walked up to him, “what are you doing?”
“Shut your face, motherfucker!” Hussein El Baruca replied, simultaneously drawing a large, blue in color, large-caliber semiautomatic pistol (probably a Colt Model 1911 or 1911A1 .45-caliber service pistol) and pointing it at Red Monahan.
“Hey, you don’t really want to do this—” Red Monahan said, whereupon Hussein El Baruca struck him, with a slashing backward motion of his right arm, in the face with the pistol, with sufficient force to knock him down and, it was subsequently learned, to cause a crack in Mr. Monahan’s full upper denture.
Then he raised the pistol to a nearly vertical position and fired it three times. One of the bullets struck a fluorescent lighting fixture on the ceiling, smashing a bulb, which caused broken glass and then a cloud of powder, from the interior coating of the bulb, to float down from the ceiling. Then, the fixture itself tore loose at one end, causing a short-circuit in the wiring. There was a flash of light, and then that entire line of lighting fixtures, one of two running from the front of the store to the rear, went off, reducing the light on the ground floor by half.
“On your fucking bellies or I’ll blow your fucking heads off!” Hussein El Baruca ordered.
The three salespeople, two men and a woman, waiting for customers in the living-room suite, and Red Monahan complied with the order. The woman crossed herself, and her lips moved in prayer as she got onto her knees and then laid on the floor.
Hussein El Baruca then turned back to the double doors and closed the Venetian blinds on them. There was a large display window on either side of the entrance. A complete bedroom set was on display in one window, and a complete bedroom set in the other. The “walls” behind the furniture in each window blocked the view of the interior of the store to passersby, and with the blinds on the doors now closed, there was no way anyone on South Street could look into Goldblatt & Sons Credit Furniture & Appliances, Inc.
The sound of the three pistol shots fired by Hussein El Baruca was muffled somewhat by the upholstered furniture on the ground floor, and because the store was open from the front to the rear, where the Credit Department was located. But it was loud enough to be heard on the second floor, where it was correctly interpreted by Hector Carlos Estivez as the signal he had been expecting.
He took what was probably a Smith & Wesson Military & Police .38 Special caliber revolver from where he had concealed it in the small of his back, held it in both hands at arm’s length, and fired two shots at the glass viewing port of a Hotpoint drier that was sitting on the floor approximately six feet from him, and two feet to the left of Mrs. Emily Watkins.
Mrs. Watkins yelped and covered her mouth with both han
ds.
Hector Carlos Estivez when he saw that he missed the glass viewing port with one of his shots, and that the second had cracked but not smashed or penetrated the glass, said, “Shit!” and fired a third time. This time the thick, tempered glass of the viewing port broke.
“On the floor, bitch!” Hector Carlos Estivez said, and Mrs. Watkins, now whimpering, dropped to her knees and then spread herself on the floor.
The shots from Estivez’s revolver were audible to Abu Ben Mohammed on the third floor, where Phil Katz was explaining to him that trying to get by with bottom-of-the-line cheap carpet was really not economy at all.
“It’s just like tires,” Mr. Katz was saying, “what you’re really buying is wear. You—What the hell was that?”
“You’re being robbed, motherfucker, that’s what it is,” Abu Ben Mohammed said, taking a large-caliber, single-action, Western-style revolver with plastic “pearl” grips from beneath his dashiki. He pushed the hammer back, cocking the pistol, and then fired at a three-foot-tall, stainless-steel cigarette receptacle that had been placed beside the elevator door.
A hole appeared near the top of the receptacle, which then slowly tilted to one side, as if in a slow-motion picture, and then fell, dislodging a sand-filled glass tray, which shattered upon striking the metal elevator threshold.
“Jesus H. Christ!” Phil Katz said.
“Lay down on the floor,” Abu Ben Mohammed ordered.
“What?”
“On the fucking floor, you heard me.”
“Yes, sir.”
The executive offices of Goldblatt & Sons Credit Furniture & Appliances, Inc., those of Mr. Samuel Goldblatt, Jr., and Mr. Harold Goldblatt, the secretary, and their secretary, Mrs. Blanche Steiner, forty-four, were at the right rear of the building. Mr. Joshua Goldblatt, the treasurer, maintained his office in the Credit Department on the ground floor.
The sound of Abu Ben Mohammed’s pistol shot attracted the attention of Mr. Samuel Goldblatt, Jr., who looked up from the work on his desk, and then stood up. When the executive offices had been built, one-way glass panels providing a view of the third-floor showroom had been installed. But they had never really worked, and eventually had been almost entirely covered up by a row of filing cabinets. The only way to see what was going on on the floor was to open the door and look.
Mr. Goldblatt did so, and found himself looking into the barrel of Abu Ben Mohammed’s revolver.
“Hands up, honky!”
“Yes, sir,” Mr. Goldblatt said.
“Oh, my God!” Mrs. Steiner said, thereby attracting Abu Ben Mohammed’s attention.
