A grocery store employee said that he is thanking God and his belt buckle for saving him from a stray bullet that smashed through the market’s front door.   

The bullet lodged in the metal buckle worn by Bienvenido Reynoso, who had only recently started his job at 8 Brothers Supermarket in Philadelphia.

“It saved my life,” Reynoso said of the belt. “I keep it for (my) whole life now.”

Reynoso, 38, said he was about to wheel a hand truck outside the market in the city’s Grays Ferry section when he heard gunshots around 4 p.m. He hit the floor.

Surveillance footage shows a man on a bike firing a gun outside the market. One person outside the store was hit in the abdomen and was hospitalized in critical condition, police said.

At first, Reynoso didn’t realize he could have been a second victim.

“When I check my body, I don’t see nothing, no blood, nothing,” he said in an interview at his home. “And I said I’m going to be OK.”

Then someone noticed a hole at the bottom of Reynoso’s shirt. That’s when he found the bullet stuck to his belt buckle.

Police took the bullet and shirt as evidence. But Reynoso, the father of a young daughter, got to keep the belt, which he said he got in New York three years ago.

Christian Vinas, 21, was working behind the counter and also dived to the ground when the shooting began. Reynoso had perfect timing in dropping to the floor, he said.

“That has to be God,” Vinas said. “Out of all the places you could get hit in the body, you get hit right there. It was truly amazing.”

Police arrested a 24-year-old suspect and charged him with attempted murder and aggravated assault.

–––––––––––––––––

Road Kill Rage

Police have charged three men with disorderly conduct for allegedly tossing a dead groundhog and grouse into a western Pennsylvania tavern — but the police chief in the rather isolated borough where it occurred said in a news release that’s better than dealing with what he considers big-city crimes.

Brookville Police Chief Ken Dworek faxed a press release to The Associated Press, announcing the charges, but scrawled at the top a description of Brookville, some 70 miles northeast of Pittsburgh, as a place “where we don’t worry about being mugged or being the victim of some drug dealer. In fact, I don’t think we’ve EVER had a drive-by shooting.”

The (Dubois) Courier-Express first reported that the men whom the chief has described as “dissatisfied customers” have now been charged with disorderly conduct for the incidents at Bill’s Bar during that weekend.

The chief said he’s received some light-hearted ribbing about the caper from friends in more urban areas, and he said unusual crimes are common, in part, because of the borough’s rural flavor.

“We had one guy who printed his own mother’s obituary in the paper because he wanted to take the day off work, when she wasn’t even dead. Another one is, we had a guy so drunk he was giving mouth-to-mouth to a dead possum on the road,” Dworek said in phone interview. “We just seem to run into that stuff up here and we get a kick out of it.”

The groundhog was tossed into the bar about 5 p.m. one Sunday, before a pickup sped off. About four hours later, the truck returned and someone tossed in the dead grouse for good measure, police said.

Online court records don’t list attorneys for the suspects, Paul Plyer, 26, of Summerville, and 19-year-olds Ryan Marshal, of Brookville, and Tyler Hetrick, of Reynoldsville. The AP could not immediately locate listed telephones for the men.

The men were charged after a witness was able to identify at least one of them. When police talked to the men, they confessed that they were angry that the bar refused to serve one of the 19-year-olds, so after drinking elsewhere, they returned to harass the bar and its patrons with the animal carcasses, Dworek told the AP in a phone interview.

Still, the bar incident was no laughing matter to the tavern owner, or the Pennsylvania Game Commission, which is investigating possible game violations in connection to it, Dworek said.