INDIANAPOLIS -- The first bullet shattered Gregory Manning's rear windshield. The next one whizzed past his head and smashed into the front windshield. A third lodged just under the car's gas tank.
The shooter, an unidentified man in a red SUV, turned off 38th Street and disappeared. Manning hit the gas.
"The way I was driving, I felt like I was running for my life," Manning said.
The 25-year-old says he was just driving home around 2 a.m. Monday when a red SUV pulled in front of him near the intersection of 38th Street and Fall Creek Parkway, right by the Indiana State Fairgrounds.
"This guy veers over into my lane, cutting me off, and then he slows down," Manning said. "All that for us to come up to a stoplight. I look over and he's just rambling, talking smack."
Manning said he just tried to ignore the other driver, until he heard a loud bang as he drove through the intersection.
"I looked back and my rearview window was shattered," he said. "Once that registered, I sped off even more."
Top: One of the bullets narrowly missed Manning and lodged in his front windshield. Bottom: Manning shows where a bullet entered his car near the gas tank.
Manning, who now teaches at Broad Ripple High School (he's a Broad Ripple graduate himself), says he doesn't know if the shooting was road rage or if the other driver "was on something." Nobody has any reason to shoot at him he says.
But, he adds, he had what he calls a "premonition" that something like this might happen. He and his family live on the far-east side, he offers as an explanation.
"I feel a little sense of paranoia, you know? Like someone is creeping up on me and my family," Manning said.
Manning went to college in New York, where he lived for several years before returning to Indy. He was assaulted on the subway in NYC once, but says it was nothing like being shot at – a first, for him.
"Numb … almost paralyzed to the point where my whole world stopped," Manning said. "One of my biggest fears and nightmares came true. I couldn't believe that I was in that line of fire where my life could have been taken away from me."
Manning's brush with apparently random violence comes a week after another 25-year-old, Reginald Hendricks, was critically injured in a road rage shooting near the intersection of Michigan and Pine streets.
MORE | Driver critically injured in shooting near downtown Indianapolis
Witnesses told police the shots came from a man in another vehicle, described as a red, four-door Nissan Altima. The driver was described as a white man in his 30s.
That driver has yet to be captured, and Hendricks' family is pleading with the public for information leading to his arrest.
Manning said he wasn't able to get a good look at the driver who fired at him – but that he'll never forget the feeling of a bullet whizzing past his head.
"I felt a little throbbing in the back of my head … not that I'd been shot, just that's how close the bullet was," he said. "To know that it could have hit me … that's insane. I'm still a little shook about it."
If you have any information in either shooting, you're urged to contact Crime Stoppers at 317-262-TIPS.
