KANSAS CITY, Mo. – The Kansas City Chiefs' Super Bowl victory rally had just ended when fan Trey Filter heard what he initially thought was fireworks. Then someone screamed, “Get him!”
And that is how the 40-year-old wound up in widely circulated video of him tackling an armed person after the post-parade shooting, which left one dead and nearly two dozen others wounded.
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“I am not a big shot, you know, tough guy, but I saw the guy they were talking about tackling, and I’m just, I just I don’t know what the hell I was thinking,” said Filter, who owns an asphalt and concrete company and lives in Maize, a suburb of Wichita, Kansas.
Police said they detained three people but released one who they determined wasn’t involved, leaving two juveniles in custody. Chief Stacey Graves acknowledged the video at a news conference and said police were working to determine if the person tackled was among those detained.
The shooting happened as Filter was walking to his car with his wife, Casey Filter, and their 15- and 12-year-old children. Surrounded by a sea of law enforcement, including people with sniper rifles stationed on rooftops, the family had felt safe. And like many in the crowd, they assumed the rapid-fire barrage was celebratory fireworks.
But then he saw police running through the crowd and “a mess starting to unfold,” he recalled.
“So then I hear, ‘Get him!’ and I look to my left, and it wasn’t but a second and a half, maybe two seconds. And somebody was running past me, and they’re yelling, ‘Get him!’ So I jumped.”
He clipped the fleeing person, knocking his gun lose. A few feet farther, another bystander grabbed for the person. Then Filter jumped on top of him, finally knocking him down after, as Filter put it, he “broke two tackles.”
“We was like, ‘We got him.' I’ll always remember that,” Filter said. “And, then they started screaming, ‘There’s a gun.’”
The men looked for the weapon, not realizing it had been knocked loose. Casey Filter, meanwhile, had noticed that the weapon fell near her after the first failed tackle. The 39-year-old stay-at-home mom nudged it with her feet and then picked it up.
“Right out of a video game,” is how Trey Filter recalled the long-barreled weapon.
Filter also said he hit the person they tackled before police pulled him off.
When it was all over, he grabbed his hat and they made their way toward the car. He recalled that he got congratulatory “attaboys” along the way, but he did not think much of it: “I felt like I had just been in a fight.”
But then local media greeted them when they got home. By then the video was spreading far and wide.
“It’s still not processed,” Trey Filter said. “We we barely let the dogs out when we got home.”
For Casey Filter, what sticks out is how fast everything changed. The weather was gorgeous, she recalled, the fans friendly.
“It was a party until it wasn’t,” she said.
A petition circulating online calls for her husband and the other bystander to get Super Bowl rings. Trey Filter laughed at the idea.
“I’m sure there were a thousand other men there that would have done it,” he said. “We, like everyone else, are just kind of hearing about this as it unfolds.”