Firearms Owners Against Crime
Institute for Legal, Legislative and Educational Action
Institute for Legal, Legislative and Educational Action
CHEYENNE – Even after being shot in the leg during Thursday’s robbery attempt at Medicap Pharmacy, Jackson Quick stood his ground, not knowing whether he would live or die.
He put pressure on his wounded right leg with his left hand while holding onto the store’s gun with his right, occasionally firing back at the men who barged in shooting.
“Since they came in shooting, I thought, ‘Yeah, they mean business; they mean to kill all of us,’” he said.
Quick refused let go of his gun when ordered to.
He said he couldn’t – one of the shooters had yelled that he was holding an employee hostage.
“I thought about that, and I thought that if I threw out my gun, nobody had a chance, he would just shoot everybody,” he said.
Quick recalled on Friday that the two shooters briefly took two different pharmacy technicians hostage during the attempted robbery.
Unbeknownst to Quick, it wasn’t the first time that day those men had taken someone hostage.
They’re suspected of being involved in a carjacking in Wheatland earlier that morning.
A bullet went through the pharmacy counter he was kneeling behind, entered his upper right thigh, “and thankfully it missed all the bone and large vessels,” he said.
Paramedics took him to Cheyenne Regional Medical Center, where he was X-rayed, cleaned and bandaged up, and sent on his way later that day with antibiotics and pain medication.
The bullet, which came to rest under the skin just below Quick’s right buttocks, won’t be surgically removed unless it causes him any problems.
“If it bothers me, I can have it removed later,” he said. “Generally, the body will encapsulate it, so it becomes just like a little cyst in there.”
He’s still in a great deal of pain, though.
“I can’t really get around very good right now,” he said. “I’m using crutches, but even that is a challenge. And I really can’t sit down or get up on my own. The pain is just terrible.”
Quick also was involved in a robbery attempt that happened at Medicap Pharmacy in December 2014.
In that incident, Quick shot the would-be robber in the chest, injuring, but not killing, him.
The suspect, Nathaniel D. Mundt, brandished a gun that turned out to be fake. He recovered and was sentenced to spend eight to 16 years for aggravated robbery.
“I thought I was fine emotionally from that, and it took me a week or two before it really came down on me,” Quick said.
This time, he doesn’t know how to feel.
“Right now, still, the whole thing is just surreal,” he said. “I already had some night terrors last night. I woke up hearing the gunfire and that guy’s voice yelling, and I thought they were in the house.”
Quick said two dark-skinned men who sounded like they could be black entered the pharmacy wearing ski masks and began shooting.
Pharmacy technicians who made it out the back door saw a third suspect waiting in a getaway vehicle, he said.
Later that afternoon, police recovered an unoccupied white Ford Edge with Platte County license plates from the Spring Court cul-de-sac about one-fifth of a mile down the street from the pharmacy.
Authorities were able to link the SUV – and the shooting suspects – to a carjacking that happened around 7:30 a.m. Thursday in Wheatland.
Wheatland Police Chief Randy Chesser said the men took a Platte County resident and her car to a remote area and abandoned her there uninjured, making off with the SUV.
She identified a second vehicle used in that incident, which has led Cheyenne Police to believe the suspects might be driving in a white Chevy Lumina.
The suspects and the Lumina still have not been found.
Quick said the suspects who entered the pharmacy wanted drugs, like Mundt.
“The one guy told the other guy – and this is before I had fired back – he said, ‘I got this. You go start emptying those oxy shelves,’ or ‘Go start clearing those oxy shelves off,’” he said.
“So they had a big black trash bag that they had filled full of drug bottles, but they had dropped it; they didn’t take it with them.
“I think that they weren’t expecting anybody to shoot back at them.”
Quick said that when the shooters came in firing guns, he “hit the deck right away” and pushed the silent alarm button to alert police.
He said officers arrived maybe three or four minutes later, about a minute or less after the suspects fled the scene.
“I grabbed for the gun that we keep there and started to go around the end of the register counter, and they were already through the consultation room,” he recalled.
“The one guy was already behind the counter. He was pointing a semi-automatic pistol toward me.”
Quick said that’s when the man saw him grab the store gun and told him to drop it.
“When I didn’t throw it out, they started shooting at me, you know, shooting at the counter and stuff that I was hiding behind,” he said.
“So I peeked up from behind the register counter, and I saw a guy taking cover behind the consultation room and pointing his pistol in my direction, so I fired,” he continued.
“When I returned, it seemed like both of those guys started shooting because there were a lot of shots very fast, and then that kind of slowed down.”
Quick said he was afraid one of the men was going to go out the back door and come around to the drive-through window and shoot at him from there, so he scooted down farther toward the front of the pharmacy to get a better angle on the window.
“That’s also where I had leaned over to fire at the guy the first time,” he noted, adding that that’s where he was shot through the counter, too.
“I thought that there was a good chance they might try to flank me, so I was trying to keep them guessing,” he said.
When the shooters finally decided to leave, “one guy ran over by the front door, and he was still waving his pistol around, looking for something or someone to shoot, so I fired at him,” Quick said.
That man ducked out the door, and the second man came and pointed a pistol back toward Quick, so he shot at him, too.
“That’s when I shot the front door,” he recalled.
Quick said he has been a pharmacist since the spring of 2012 and started working at Medicap in July of that year.
Before that, he worked as a nurse after earning his nursing license in 2005 or 2004.
His background in the health-care field helped him know how to tend to his wound, but he did fear for his life.
He said he thought that if the bullet hit his femoral artery, he could be dead in a matter of minutes.
Then, “as soon as those guys were out the door, I started yelling for help,” he said.
“I laid down and laid back and had (a pharmacy technician) put direct pressure on the wound.”
As he did after the 2014 shooting at Medicap, Quick emphasized how pharmacy robberies are on the rise across the country.
“It’s at an epidemic-type level, and we just need to be better prepared,” he said. “We need to have more protections in place.”
Quick said that Medicap’s owner, Gene Barbour, already is talking about redesigning the front of the store and putting up bullet-proof glass.
The pharmacy, though short-staffed, reopened Friday to catch up on all the work missed Thursday.
Despite what Quick has been through, he said he still loves his job and has no plans to leave the retail pharmacy profession or Medicap.
“I really enjoy my job working with patients, and they seem to appreciate me, which gives me a sense of satisfaction,” he said.
Quick also doesn’t doubt that the shooters will slip up and find themselves in handcuffs at some point.
“I have hope they’ll be caught,” he said.
“They seem to be almost like professional criminals; they seemed like they had some tactical skills when they came in.
“They’ll keep it up. And hopefully nobody gets hurt, but they’ll do something that gets them caught.”