Avondale man complied with robber, and was still shot: ‘There was no reason for him to start shooting’

“Give me your wallet.”

A terrified Jay Gabel cooperated with the gunman who confronted him on a busy Milwaukee Avenue in Avondale Tuesday night.

But then, Gabel felt his leg collapse underneath him while trying to run away and knew he had been shot.

“My first reaction was, ‘Oh, my God, I literally just got shot right now,'” Gabel told the Sun-Times in a telephone interview from his hospital bed at Advocate Illinois Masonic Medical Center Wednesday morning. “I saw my leg and was like, ‘That’s not good.'”

Gabel, a bartender who lives in Avondale, stopped at a Dollar Tree after donating plasma and was on his way home around 8:50 p.m. Tuesday when a gunman attacked him in front of an elementary school in the 3200 block of North Milwaukee Avenue.

“I’m on the phone and all of a sudden this guy walks in front of me and I see that he has a gun … but he’s not directly pointing it at me, he’s brandishing it,” Gabel said. “I told him he didn’t want my phone because it’s a piece of crap that’s cracked.”

Gabel added: “I could tell he was looking for more things to try and take from me and I didn’t really like how that was going because he already had my wallet and he was still looking for more s – – -.”

Gabel, 37, didn’t know how much longer the robbery was going to take or whether the situation would escalate. As cars drove, by he saw an opportunity to flee.

That’s when the attacker opened fire, Chicago police said.

“I have been weirdly fixated on the fact that he had my wallet and I was out in the street and he still shot at me,” Gabel said. “He already had my wallet, there was no reason for him to start shooting at me.”

Gabel heard the blast of gunfire and felt the excruciating pain of his leg being shattered by the bullet but initially barely felt anything because of the adrenaline coursing through his veins.

After a couple of steps, he felt something else snapping under his weight and he collapsed in the street. Gabel pulled off his shirt and began using it as a tourniquet while passersby called 911.

“I [couldn’t] move my leg at all without shooting pain everywhere,” Gabel said. “Even moving other parts of my body will adjust the leg so that it causes more pain.

“It’s messy and it hurts.”

The shooting broke his leg in two places and Gabel was scheduled for surgery to put screws in the broken bones Wednesday afternoon.

“Depending on where the bullet is, they might have to leave it in because if it’s not near the surface of the skin then it means they’ll have to dig through a bunch of soft tissue and possibly do far more damage than just [leaving it] in there would do,” Gabel said.

“I might have a damn bullet in me for the rest of my life.”

No arrests have been made.

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