PITTSBURGH -- The SWAT officer told Andrea Wedner it was time to go.
Covered in blood and with a shattered arm, Wedner kissed her fingers. She touched them to her dead mother’s skin.
“I cried out, ‘Mommy,’” she said.
An officer led her out.
Wedner was the only Tree of Life congregant left alive in the Pervin Chapel on Oct. 27, 2018, when officers and medics escorted her from the room — the same room in which she grew up worshipping, and the same room she’d been married in years earlier.
Her mother, a spry 97-year-old woman who Wedner called sharp as a tack, remained where she lay under a pew — their pew, where they always sat for Saturday services.
Wedner was the last witness called by prosecutors in their case against accused shooter Robert Bowers. On Wednesday morning, she ended more than 10 days of grueling testimony from survivors, first responders and experts who were or became connected to the Squirrel Hill synagogue in the wake of the shooting.
Wedner’s mother, Rose Mallinger, was one of 11 killed that day. Each congregation that worshipped in the synagogue at Shady and Wilkins avenues was scarred by the tragedy, one that left the congregations without some of their most faithful core members: Joyce Fienberg, Richard Gottfried, Rose Mallinger, Jerry Rabinowitz, Cecil and David Rosenthal, Bernice and Sylvan Simon, Daniel Stein, Melvin Wax, Irving Younger.
Wedner was shot in the arm and her mother in the face.
“I could see she was shot … that she would not survive,” she told jurors, describing her mother’s agonal breathing.
Her mother wore dentures on the top and had a partial plate on the bottom of her mouth. She said she saw a piece of that partial on the ground near her mother.
“I knew she wasn’t going to survive.”
Bowers faces 63 federal charges related to the shooting, and he could face the death penalty. The prosecution will rest its case this afternoon.
Wedner described watching her right arm explode. It looked like shredded raw meat, she said. She said she tried to stay quiet, unsure of where the shooter had gone. Assistant U.S. Attorney Troy Rivetti asked why she didn’t try to get up and leave.
“I wasn’t going to leave my mother, and I didn’t know where he was,” she said.
The shooter had opened fire on Wedner and her mother the second time he came into the Pervin Chapel, the small worship space the Tree of Life congregation used for most services.
Wedner said there are pieces of that morning she can recall perfectly. There are others that are foggy, less clear. She recalled picking her mother up from her Squirrel Hill home like she did every Saturday. They parked in their usual spot behind the Simons. Inside, Bernice Simon asked Ms. Wedner about her granddaughter — she always did, she said.
They took their usual seats. Wedner couldn’t recall if it was three or four rows from the back, but she knew it was theirs because of the worn spot on the seats. They brought cushions each week. The pews were hard and uncomfortable.
Prayers had started when they heard the crash from the lobby. Then came gunfire. Wedner said it was loud and rapid.
“My mother looked at me and asked, ‘What do we do?’”
She said her mother sounded scared.
Wedner spoke clearly and with confidence throughout her roughly 40-minute testimony. She did not cry. She’d asked only that the recording of her 911 call not be played while she was still on the stand. On it, she could hear herself being shot, she could hear her mother being shot, and she could hear her mother dying.
The heart-wrenching recording captured Wedner’s terrified voice. She asked the call-taker to please hurry.
“He keeps shooting and shooting,” she said.
The recording captures her mother whimpering, scared in the background. Wedner tried to comfort her, to shush her — to keep her safe.
Then, there are loud, booming sounds. There is screaming, wailing — the kind driven by physical pain but also anguish. There is loud, deep, ragged breathing that, after a minute or two, drops off. Someone says, “Oh, god.”
The call stops after that.
Wedner was ultimately led out of the chapel and into another small room to assess her injuries. That was where Officer Tim Matson first encountered her, though he did not know who she was at the time. He said Ms. Wedner had an arm wound, and she was wailing.
Officer Matson’s testimony centered on the moments right before he was shot and everything that came after. SWAT officers had called for a police dog or a robot to breach the closed door on one of the uppermost levels of the synagogue, but neither was available.
Officer Matson stood on the right side of the doorway, which was positioned on a small landing between two small flights of stairs. SWAT Officer Michael Saldutte stood on the other side, and he asked the other officer if he was ready. Officer Matson nodded.
He walked to the threshold and saw no immediate threat. He walked in and to his left.
“It felt like a dog hit me in the legs and took me off my feet,” he told jurors.
He’d been shot, but he didn’t realize it yet. He said he fell and might have passed out — he called it the darkest, calmest place — until Officer Saldutte dove on top of him to protect the downed officer.
He had two thoughts, he said, chief among them: “[Expletive], you just got shot in your head.”
The second thought was about how he needed to do something.
From there, the memories come in bits and pieces, he said. He somehow made it to the bottom of the stairs, telling his friend and fellow officer John Craig he was “[expletive]ed up.”
Officer Matson apologized more than once for his language.
He said he remembered SWAT Officer Andrew Miller screaming at him, but he didn’t know what he was saying. He remembered tactical paramedic Jon Atkinson telling him to “man the [expletive] up and breathe.” Later, he said, he was told he’d been screaming that he couldn’t breathe. He doesn’t remember that part, he said.
He didn’t feel pain until officers and medics tried to pick him up by his right leg — they didn’t realize he’d been shot in both legs.
His next memory was being carried out on a stretcher. Outside, he testified, he saw faces looking down at him.
“I remember looking at faces and thought, ‘I must be [expletive]ed up, they’re looking at me with poker faces,” he said.
The ordeal left him with, as he put it, “seven new holes in my body,” and he’s undergone 25 surgeries. The bullets shattered his right kneecap, his left tibia, one traveled down his arm, broke his ulna, severed a tendon and was ultimately removed from his ring finger knuckle.
A bullet pierced his helmet and fractured his skull and upper jaw. He was hospitalized for 16 weeks, he said, and he still suffers some memory loss.
Prosecutors spent 10 days walking jurors — seven men and 10 women after one juror was excused in the second week — through every detail of the timeline and the scene of the massacre. That began with some of the most harrowing evidence and testimony, including the frantic 911 call from victim Bernice Simon. Jurors heard her panicked voice tell the call-taker they’d been attacked, her husband had been shot, and she feared him dead.
The recording also captured the second round of gunfire that would kill Bernice Simon, her ragged breathing and then silence.
Tree of Life Rabbi Jeffrey Myers also testified that first day, describing in detail his 40+ minute ordeal hiding in a bathroom off the choir loft. The door didn’t lock, and his hand gripped the door knob the entire time.
Jurors saw the man who has become the living face of the attack — confident and with an eye toward the future in every public appearance — break down on the stand as he described his belief that he would die. He wept harder each time he gave a name of a congregant he never saw again.
Survivors told jurors of the absolute terror they each felt from their respective hiding places. Carol Black and Barry Werber hid in a storage area off of the New Light sanctuary. They saw Melvin Wax gunned down in front of them, staying so still that the shooter did not see them in the darkness. Black told of hoping her brother, Richard Gottfried, had survived. He didn’t.
Daniel Leger described bleeding to death on the steps to the main level. He was a nurse — he knew he was dying. He’d made peace with that when he took a chance and reached toward a leg that ultimately belonged to tactical medic Justin Sypolt. Leger survived but carries the physical and emotional scars from that day. The latter can be heard in his voice, particularly when he speaks of how he never again saw his friend and fellow Dor Hadash congregant Dr. Jerry Rabinowitz.
Pittsburgh patrolmen Dan Mead and Michael Smidga described encountering the gunman as the first officers on the scene. Officer Mead stared down the shooter through the glass doors of the synagogue’s main entrance. The gunman’s bullet tore through the officer’s hand. He’s never returned to duty.
A half-dozen Pittsburgh SWAT officers and tactical paramedics walked jurors through the gun battle with the shooter, who they found holed up in a classroom on one of the uppermost levels of the massive maze-like synagogue.
Each described their entry into the synagogue and route to the upper floors from their own point of view, each adding their own layer of emotion and details only they captured that day: the blood and the bodies, the eerie silence, the shell casings rolling across the marble floor. Upstairs, each described the gunfire and the powerful rounds that exploded around them.
Experts walked jurors through the minutia of the investigation, each with their own narrow window of work. Pathologists described what bullets do to bodies — how they don’t travel in straight lines and how they break apart, twist, and turn. FBI evidence collection teams told of how they must document every piece of evidence: Every blood pool, every shell casing, every abandoned prayer book and broken window.
Analysts specializing in technology walked jurors through each hate-laden social media post the shooter made to the far-right social media platform Gab. Some talked of ovens, others purporting Adolph Hitler was right, almost all railing against the “dirty,” “filthy” Jews. Others took aim at the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, a Jewish faith-based refugee resettlement organization that partnered with congregations across the country, including Dor Hadash. One expert pointed to all of the antisemitic tropes and white supremacist talking points in the Gab posts as well as the more subtle racist dog whistles. Another showed how the shooter visited the HIAS website less than two hours before the shooting.
It’s not clear what witnesses, if any, the defense will call to the stand. Lead defense attorney Judy Clarke made clear in her opening statements that guilt isn’t in question: Bowers, she said, killed 11 people in the synagogue that day. She told jurors to look closely at his intent, though, implying that his hatred was not because the victims were Jewish, but rather because one congregation that worshipped there supported HAIS, who he believed was bringing “invaders” into his country to “kill our children.”
