With a crash through the iron fence surrounding Madame Ruth's Card and Palm Readings, the owner and self-proclaimed psychic says she found herself looking down the barrel of a gun and into the eyes of a desperate man.
Madame Ruth Evans said, “I looked into his eyes and I knew he was not a killer. So I was not scared of him. He was more scared than I was. He was shaking, shaking, shaking with the gun and pointing it and I figured it might go off, because he's too nervous.”
Police say it started when 69-year-old Gary Joe Walker robbed the Wells Fargo bank at Spicewood Springs Road and Mesa Drive before just before 11:30 a.m. on Saturday. Police chased Walker who was driving a black Nissan SUV, but lost him. Not long after, police received calls of an SUV crashing in Central Austin, with a man witnesses described as bald, white and in his 50’s, running with a gun.
“He got the gun and put it to my face and my chest and pointed it, he said, ‘I want a car. You have a car?’” Evans says. “I told him, ‘I don't have a car.’ (He said,) ‘Lady, give me a car.’ (I said,) ‘I don't have a car.’ He kept pointing the gun. So my daughter came out and he pointed the gun on her. (He said,) ‘You have a car? You have keys?’”
Evans says she lied and said, “Yes.” She and her daughter went inside to get them and locked the doors instead. While they were inside, she says Walker stashed some kind of black box in her yard and moved on, to neighbor Lydia Calderon.
“At this point he's walking, bug-eyes and pointing the gun at me and so I'm backing away from him,” Calderon said. “He didn't say anything to me. I didn't say anything to him.”
Visibly shaking and her voice breaking, Calderon was so upset by the ordeal that she had to stop her interview with KVUE.
Walker ran away. Shortly after, calls started coming in of shots fired at nearby Webb Middle School. That is where police found Walker, dead from apparent suicide.
No one else was hurt during the ordeal. The school is closed for the summer.
Witnesses say police took the black box from Evans’ yard. Police did not say what it contained, but confirm that Walker got away with an undisclosed amount of cash.
