Bloodshed in Baltimore moved to another venue yesterday — the city’s biggest employer and one of the nation’s most prestigious medical centers, Johns Hopkins Hospital.

There, in a drama that riveted the city and spawned panic and confusion at the hospital, a man distraught over his mother’s medical condition after spine surgery, shot the doctor who operated on her and then shot and killed his mother and himself, police said.

The man, identified as Paul Warren Pardus, 50, of Arlington, Virgina, “took his mother’s life and then his own life” with a “small caliber handgun,” said Baltimore Police Department Public Affairs Director Anthony Guglielmi outside Hopkins following the incident.

The physician, Assistant Professor David B. Cohen, had just days ago performed a six-hour surgery on Pardus’ mother, 84-year-old Jean Davis, to relieve a spinal compression, but that resulted in paralysis, according to sources.

“He is a very good surgeon, with a very good reputation,” said a source, who works with Cohen. “He is an honest and straight guy, not someone who would try to hide it if there was a mistake. He would give the patient the real explanation” for a bad outcome.

The incident occurred at around 11 a.m. while Pardus was speaking to Cohen about his mother’s treatment, according to police. Cohen was listed in stable condition, sources said. Sources said Pardus was upset because his mother was paralyzed. The Baltimore Sun quotes a witness who heard him yell “You ruined my mother.”

Fear and confusion at Hopkins

The normally busy-but-orderly routine of a Hopkins workaday morning was replaced by evacuation alerts, police helicopters and people running for cover. Eventually, there were SWAT teams and snipers and hospital windows taped to indicate (to snipers) where the gunman wasn’t.

Perry Stevenson, a parking garage worker, said he first learned of the situation at about 11:30 a.m., when he saw people evacuating the building in a “mass exodus” while shouting “Someone got shot! Someone got shot!”
Then he said he watched in amazement as SWAT teams armed with battering rams swarmed the building.

His friend Alyssa, a Hopkins employee who asked that her last name not be used, told Stevenson by phone that she was able to exit the hospital “by tunnel” even though the building was locked down and employees were told to remain behind closed doors “away from windows,” as one advisory email to employees ordered.

When Alyssa left the building, no hospital or police authorities were gate-keeping the tunnels at a time when “no one was supposed to get in and out,” Stevenson said, voicing concern about the level of security in the building aloud as he continued waiting for access to his car on East Monument Street, four hours after the shooting took place.

For bystanders, the theme of the day seemed to be access. For every person who couldn’t get into the building, there was another who couldn’t get out. Employees and patients crowded the street corners surrounding the perimeter of the hospital trying to get information from the police and one another.

Some patients said they missed their surgeries and two women stuck inside missed flights out of Baltimore. A man on the corner of Jefferson and North Wolfe waited more than two hours to get his car—another man over four—and other employees on the same corner were stuck outside without keys or phones for hours, after initially being told to evacuate. The hospital ultimately ordered staff to remain inside on lockdown.

Beth Nardi, a brain imaging researcher at Hopkins, was stuck outside for hours. Nardi said administrators sent alerts to fellow employees instructing them to evacuate, though she happened to be out of the building at that time.

“A lot of people are still in there…they might have evacuated but I haven’t seen anyone come out in 45 minutes,” she said.

Nardi said she was told that the texts and emails basically said there’s a shooter in the building, and to go into office and lock door. Some of the employees “took patients into the rooms to get them out of the main area,” Nardi said.

Debra Young was on the 4th floor visiting her husband around 11:30 am when hospital staff ordered them to stay inside their room with the door closed.

Young, whose husband was at Hopkins for a double lung transplant, said she wasn’t scared because employees did a good job of keeping things under control.

“We were fine. We were on lockdown,” said Young. “I was very cool, calm and collected…The staff handled it very well . . . It’s a horrible thing that happened today, though.”

Brittany Nadeau and Amanda Mosser, two chipper young nurses in pink scrubs, were on the 8th floor of Nelson for a meeting when the shooting took place. They said they saw Cohen being pushed past them by other doctors after he was shot.

Police asked them if they were safe and told them to go into a room on the 8th floor and shut the door. There, they were able to check their phones and receive the University’s email alerting employees to the shooting and issuing procedural safety information including to stay away from windows and “don’t talk to the media.”

“We did feel safe but…we were a little startled,” said Nadeau.

Confusion on the ground and online

Before key facts were confirmed, a flurry of reports—many conflicting—began erupting from the media, police, Hopkins employees, patients and bystanders in various portals throughout the city, from online and television news reports to street corners and even the Baltimore Police Department’s twitter feed.

New media also served as a lifeline, as people riveted to their computers and cell phones, and especially the #HopkinsShooting hashtag, learned to stay away from the hospital, although there were a lot of surreal peppy reports — that most of the hospital was “open for business.” One of the best photos of the day came in the form of a Twitpic by the Sun’s indefatigable Justin Fenton.

Clearly the biggest mistaken report of the day was the one from Baltimore police saying that the gunman, who had barricaded himself in his mother’s room, had been shot and killed by police officers.

“That was wrong,” said Guglieljmi. “Our officers never fired a shot,” he said, calling it a “miscommunication.”

When reports that there had actually been a murder-suicide began circulating, and were confirmed by police, media scrambled to correct their reporting.

Many of the facts of the case will clearly take days to sort out. Although Gugliemi said that no witnesses had heard gun shots, a clearly shooken-up Hopkins employee in scrubs on the corner of Jefferson and North Wolfe saw the physician being shot.

“I can’t talk about it,” she said, and continued to talk on her cell phone.

– Fern Shen also contributed to this story.