“As his head clears the window frame, he says, ‘This is going down,’ ” Mr. Dunn said, quoting Mr. Davis and using an expletive in the quote. Mr. Dunn said he saw Mr. Davis with a weapon. “His threats and actions left no doubt in my mind that it was firearm. It looked like a firearm and he treated it like a firearm.”
As the Durango backed up quickly to elude the gunfire, Mr. Dunn stepped out of his own car, dropped to one knee and fired more volleys to thwart any “blind fire,” or wild, random shooting out the car window, he said.
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At that point, he said, his mind was on his fiancée, Rhonda Rouer, who was about to walk out of the convenience store. “I did it in my panicked state,” he said, of the later volleys. “I was worried about the blind firing situation, where they would shoot over their heads, whatever, and hit me, or hit me and Rhonda.”
After a shaken Ms. Rouer got back inside the car, Mr. Dunn pulled out of the gas station and drove to the hotel where the two spent the night as planned. Mr. Dunn said he told his fiancée several times that the teenager had threatened him with a gun or some kind of weapon. The next morning, after the couple saw news reports that someone had died at the gas station, Mr. Dunn said he called a neighbor, a federal law enforcement official, and told him he had to discuss something with him when he got home. The police arrested him shortly after he arrived in Brevard, a two-and-a-half-hour drive away.