As the panicked crowd scrambled to get a way, little Aiden was pinned under his grievously wounded father, Tom and Morgan Brooks tell Inside Edition.
A father and son are speaking out about how they helped a little boy after his parents were slain in the Highland Park Fourth of July parade shooting.
Tom and Morgan Brooks had just arrived at the parade when the gunfire erupted.
As the panicked crowd scrambled to get a way, they saw little Aiden pinned under his grievously wounded father, Kevin McCarthy.
“Morgan says, ‘There’s a boy, dad.’ And I said, ‘Let’s go!’ And he’s like, ‘No, there’s a boy.’ It didn’t register at first. And then he showed me. He said, ‘There he is. Let’s go get him.’ I’m like, ‘Let’s go get him.’ I tried to pull the boy from under his father by his arms but he was underneath him pretty good. So, I think Morgan at the time helped the guy get up a little bit, moved him just enough so we could pull out Aiden from under his father,” Tom Brooks said.
At that point, Kevin McCarthy was still breathing, clinging to life as blood poured from multiple gunshot wounds. His wife Irina was close by, apparently already dead.
“[Kevin] was breathing, but he wasn’t saying anything. He wasn’t able to speak, but he was able to breathe,” Morgan Brooks said.
They say Aiden, who was covered in his dad’s blood, remained calm.
“[Aiden] said, ‘Dad shot? Mom shot?’ And I would say to him, ‘Everything’s going to be fine.’ I didn’t know his name. I didn’t know. I was just talking to him, telling him everything was going to be fine. He just kept saying that over and over again. Wasn’t crying, very calm, very wide-eyed. When we pulled him out from under his father, we inspected him, pulled his shirt up, because he had blood all over him,” Tom Brooks said.
As Kevin McCarthy lay dying, the Brooks tried to comfort him.
“We spoke to him at the end. We were telling him that his son’s going to be OK, his son is safe. That’s what we were telling him,” Tom Brooks said.
They want the world to know that Kevin did everything he could to protect his son.
“He was shielding his son in the last moments of his life. True hero, unbelievable,” Tom said.
A GoFundMe set up for Aiden has raised nearly $3 million.
