Hero raised in San Antonio helped stop Chabad shooter

 

By Sig Christenson
San Antonio Express-News

When Oscar Stewart heard the sound of gunfire, it would have been natural to run the other way — but it also would have been contrary to what he’d done as a soldier in Iraq and as a San Antonio teenager who once tackled and punched an abusive stepfather.

So Stewart, 51 operated on pure instinct. Running toward the rifle-toting assailant at Chabad of Poway, a San Diego Calif.-area synagogue, on April 27, Stewart was empty-handed but yelled so loudly, people in a nearby building heard it.

“I’m going to kill you!” he shouted.

Yelling had worked before, when Stewart ran into a mountain lion in Texas. And it worked again, startling and distracting an anti-Semitic extremist armed with an AR-15 semiautomatic rifle who had just fatally shot a congregant and wounded the rabbi.

People called Stewart a hero. He brushes off that kind of talk. What prompted his snap decision in a horrific and chaotic moment was more complicated.

Part of it was military training and his life in the war zone from 2003-04. Stewart, an Orthodox Jew whose faith first took root in San Antonio, believes the other part was the hand of God.

His sister, Maria Stewart Leal, had a simpler view.

“He’s always been very courageous and always been the kind of guy who stood up for those who couldn’t stand up for themselves,” said Leal, 49, of San Antonio.

More than a week has passed since the shooting. John T. Earnest, 19, was arrested after fleeing the synagogue.

Stewart has been celebrated across the country, along with an off-duty Border Patrol agent, Jonathan Morales, who also confronted the shooter. Both were honored last week by President Donald Trump at a White House ceremony.

Stewart had a hardscrabble upbringing in San Antonio. He and his sister had little in the way of material possessions but were deeply loved by their mother, who moved the family when opportunities for better schools arose, they said.

Stewart went to the University of Texas at San Antonio for two years and Leal studied at Texas A&M University, where she earned a degree and became a nurse.

They spent time in a run-down home on the South Side that didn’t have a refrigerator, and later lived in Victoria Courts, a now-razed housing project south of downtown, that rented for $438 a month.

In those days, their mother earned $3.35 an hour — minimum wage, often working two jobs.

Daniella married several times. She didn’t have a car. The kids walked a lot, to school and to a small Handy Andy on Presa and Roosevelt for groceries. They had a 15-minute walk to a laundromat, so on occasion Daniella washed their clothes in the bathtub and the kids hung them out in the back yard.

“We look back and say, ‘My God, how did she do it?’” Leal said.

Though Daniella struggled financially, she’d give others money if they needed it. Coaches also emerged as big role models. Oscar Stewart recalled Virgil Martinez, a coach at the Roosevelt Park pool, asking him to join the swim team. It was an important step that helped him build the discipline needed to compete.

Leal also made the swim team and both practiced at the pool early on summer mornings.

“I remember my mom would keep a little tab at the concession stand so we could have a small, little something (to eat) during the day and we’d go walk home and start again,” Leal said. “But our grades were always real good. She made sure that we did really well in school.”

Stewart got hooked on swimming. He met another coach, a San Antonio Independent School District aquatics instructor named Don Walker, who “kind of kept me out of trouble and kept me focused on something to do.”

Walker, 60, now the Alamo Heights High School head swimming coach, said Oscar wasn’t naturally gifted but became a top athlete, doing well in district and regional contests.

“He was a leader,” Walker said. “He was very even-keeled — not loud-mouthed, pretty laid back, very collected and controlled, and kids like that. He wasn’t in your face. He led by example.”

Before he graduated from Jefferson High School in 1986, other forces also were at work to shape Stewart.

He was an “ethnic Jew,” he said, but didn’t even know his religion until he was 15 and asked his mother about it. He grew more spiritually aware after meeting Rabbi Aryeh Scheinberg at Congregation Rodfei Sholom. He also got to know Rabbi Chaim Block of the Chabab Lubavitch community.

Scheinberg “kind of set my moral compass,” Stewart said, calling the rabbi a “deeds and actions kind of guy,” while Block “was more a spiritual guy,” helping him establish rules that guide how he deals with others.

“God doesn’t see color, God doesn’t see religion,” Stewart said. “He sees a soul, and he created our souls, so I believe you have to look at people in that way, that they’re a divine creation. You’re going to treat them well regardless of your preconceived prejudices or your notions. You’re going to treat them well based on looking at them as a divine entity.”

Stewart alternated between the two congregations, since he was “just starting out, and I think he probably enjoyed both environments,” Block remembered. “There’s so much to teach and so much to impart that I see that he was just trying to get as much as he could.”

College didn’t seem a good fit and it was Scheinberg who advised Stewart to enter the military. He served four years in the Navy, a member of an elite bomb disposal unit, before returning to civilian life.

Then came 9/11. Stewart by then was in Fargo, N.D. He joined that state’s Army National Guard and later became an electrical inspector with a battalion attached to the 3rd Infantry Division during the 2003 invasion of Iraq. The unit later was reattached to the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment and sent to Ramadi, west of Baghdad. Things were calm there initially, but as the insurgency intensified he saw combat.

Stewart said he had conversations with locals, and one educated Iraqi asked him, in English, “‘When are you guys leaving so we can fix this country?’ … They wanted to fix it and we prevented them, and I think as time went on that same guy who wanted to fix the country didn’t see it as a repair process but as a getting-us-out-of-there process.”

He wasn’t thinking about the war when he came to his synagogue the last day of Passover. But he was restless. He typically sits on the front row, but he went outside for a bit, and right before the Torah reading, he left his seat again to stand in the back.

“It was as if I was expecting something,” Stewart recalled. “I don’t know why I did it.”

It was more crowded than usual, perhaps because Rabbi Yisroel Goldstein had added prayers for the departed, which brings older people in. When the shooting started, Stewart initially headed for the door but did an abrupt U-turn. Angry, he ran toward the gunman, screaming and cursing.

Looking back, the reaction reminds Stewart of an incident when, as a teenager, a stepfather threw a punch at him, triggering a brawl at home. His knowledge of combat kicked in. So much was reactive, like the time Stewart, who was about 12, scared off a mountain lion west of San Antonio by yelling at it.

“I got pissed,” he said. “I wasn’t going to let him hurt anybody. … I didn’t really have any conscious thought about what I did. … I was just yelling at him the entire time, and whatever came to my mind. I kept trying to throw him off and it worked. He was very scared.”

Witnesses said the gunman’s rifle had jammed. Stewart assumed it was working — the man got off two shots after his initial yell — and maintained a close enough distance so he couldn’t level it.

“If a guy has a rifle within 2 or 3 feet of you, it’s very hard for him to use it against you, and so I just stayed on him the entire time,” Stewart said. “He couldn’t ever stop to use it and if he stopped I would have caught him and that would have been the end of that, so it was just running the entire time.”

Scheinberg, now in his 49th year at Rodfei Sholom, wasn’t surprised to learn of Stewart’s actions.

“He was that type. He was always a person that would act to accomplish a good deed or to materialize a thought,” the rabbi said. “Once he made the decision, and there was a tremendous intuitive sense of what is right, what is good, he didn’t dwell much on ‘should I do it’ or ‘shouldn’t I do it.’”

The man police identified as Earnest, his rifle dangling from a tactical sling over one shoulder, several magazines tucked into a vest, ran to his car. Stewart hit the vehicle with his fists. Morales, the Border Patrol officer, warned him to back away and then fired four rounds into the Honda sedan.

“I never stopped trying to use overwhelming force on him, and so when the Border Patrol agent came out and unloaded on him, that was, like I say, the cherry on the sundae because (the gunman) lost it, he was done,” Stewart said. “He had no desire to engage anybody anymore.”

Inside, a fatally wounded Lori Gilbert-Kaye, 60, was lying on the floor in the lobby. Stewart and a retired doctor began administering CPR before her husband came over. Howard Kaye, a physician, took over and started CPR as well, not realizing the victim was his wife. When he did, Kaye fainted.

Stewart believes it was God who moved him to challenge the shooter.

“The reasons behind me doing all this, I think, are religious. I had the devotion to God, a belief in God … and God doesn’t want us going around destroying and God wants to try and save,” he said.

Block said he was proud of Stewart, and gratified that he got so much out of his religious education here, adding, “I think a lot of it was who he is and his personality. … What he took from those experiences in San Antonio is also a tribute to him as a person.”

In his earliest readings of the Talmud, the primary source of Jewish religious law and theology, Stewart said he learned the importance of doing whatever was possible to save a life.

“I feel sorry for the guy. I really do, because he ruined his life,” he said of Earnest. “The guy’s 19 years old, and his life is basically over.”

“Somebody asked, what would you say to him and I said, I would have told him, ‘Look, if you got to meet me, if you got to know me, you would know I’m not some evil person whose trying to manipulate the world’s finances or something stupid he wrote in his manifesto. And you would know that the rabbi’s a great guy,” Stewart added. “If this gentleman had gotten to know me and gotten to know these people … he wouldn’t have done what he did.”

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Sig Christenson covers the military and veterans in San Antonio, Bexar County and the nation. This article is reprinted with permission from the San Antonio Express-News. Access the original article by clicking here.