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Sami Nikula heard the shots – then he saw the shot man lying outside the pizzeria.
He stopped the car, threw himself out and started doing CPR.
– That was my first thought, to save him if possible.
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Sami Nikula, 52, his girlfriend and two of their children were about to get into the car and drive down to the community in Hallstahammar at around 7pm on Thursday evening.
Then a bang was heard. After a pause of ten seconds, there were four, five more bangs.
– I told them in the car, that was shooting. Then my boyfriend jokingly said, uh, that’s just a pretend gun.
The family drove off. Just half a minute later they arrived at the intersection where the man was lying on the footpath outside a pizzeria.
– I understood that he had been shot, because that was what I had heard. But I turned him over and saw that he was still alive.
Sami began CPR while yelling for his daughter to call an ambulance.
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full screen Sami Nikula, 52, intervened when he saw what happened. Photo: Screenshot/Instagram
“Feeled the pulse disappear”
Sami continued with lifesaving attempts for 3–4 minutes.
– He began to lose consciousness more and more, so I lost contact with him completely. Then I felt how the pulse also disappeared. So he died. But I continued until the ambulance arrived.
Sami says that it was obvious to move in.
– No, there was no doubt. It is a matter of course.
After the incident, there are a lot of thoughts spinning. When we talk a few hours after the incident, Sami says that he has just started to take in what happened.
– My first reaction is actually that a young man died.
– It’s someone’s child.
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full screen The police outside the pizzeria on Thursday evening. Photo: Peter Wixtröm
People started filming: “Go to hell”
Sami was the first to arrive – then the man was alone. But after a short while, people began to gather around the place.
– People started filming and I screamed in pure fucking anger and asked them to go to hell. This is not a game. It’s so disrespectful that it doesn’t exist. But unfortunately that’s how it looks.
A shooting while it’s still light outside on a Thursday night – that’s something that shakes Hallstahammar.
– We have talked about the escalating violence here in Sweden. I said a couple of weeks ago, it’s only a matter of time before it happened here. And now it happened.
– My second thought was: Damn it, my children will have to grow up in this. At seven o’clock in the evening, my son was going out for a walk. It is a residential area with mostly families with children. Just a thing like that.