Grand Traverse County Sheriff Michael Shea publicly acknowledged the courage of everyday Americans who stepped in to stop the carnage.
“It’s not very often that we have citizens that are willing to step up and take action,” he said.
And step up they did. Matt Kolakowski and Chris O’Brien were on a family trip when they stopped at Walmart for supplies. Kolakowski’s 13-year-old daughter and her friend came along. What happened next was something out of a war zone.
“He’s got a knife!” Kolakowski recalled a Walmart employee shouting after the rampage began.
The former Marine acted instinctively — ordering the girls to stay behind while he and O’Brien chased after the suspect. With no weapon on hand, Kolakowski grabbed the nearest thing he could find — an empty shopping cart — and took off after the knifeman.
“I thought to myself, ‘Well, I don’t got no weapon, so what am I going to do?’ So, I just grabbed an empty grocery cart and just took off after him as hard as I could,” he said.
As Gille fled into the parking lot, Kolakowski managed to hit him in the ankle with the cart, briefly slowing him down. The suspect continued to rant incoherently, proclaiming himself a soldier and accusing shoppers of being “bad people.”
“He was screaming something about him being a soldier, and that everybody in Walmart were bad people,” Kolakowski said. “His eyes were just bulging out of his head.”
Then, fate intervened. Another bystander — also a Marine — was carrying his pistol after a recent trip to the gun range.
“The other Marine told me that he just went shooting at a range, and he forgot to take his pistol off his hip,” Kolakowski explained. “That’s what it all came down to.”
With a firearm suddenly in play, the situation changed fast. The suspect dropped the knife, and Kolakowski pinned him to the ground until deputies arrived.
“I just turned into somebody that I haven’t been in a long time and just stayed on top of him until the deputy ran up and jumped on top of him with a rifle in his face, and I helped the deputy arrest him,” he said.
But the chaos wasn’t over. Kolakowski then helped tend to the wounded, who were sprawled across the blood-drenched parking lot. Sirens blared. Stretchers rolled. Shock turned to heartbreak.
“It was just mass panic in the parking lot – ambulances, lights everywhere, sirens everywhere, blood everywhere, people getting loaded up on carts, put in ambulances,” Kolakowski said. “It was quite the rush.”
Meanwhile, O’Brien headed back into the store to locate Kolakowski’s daughter, only to be greeted by a grisly sight.
“When I walked back in, it was an absolute nightmare,” O’Brien said. “It was blood everywhere.”
In a time when the country often feels divided, this terrifying moment was met with the courage and grit of ordinary Americans who refused to let evil win. With the suspect in custody and victims fighting to recover, the investigation now shifts to motive — and why a quiet Walmart in Michigan became the scene of what prosecutors are calling an act of terrorism.
