'Oh My God, This is It,' Thought Roseville Quizno's Manager Facing Sawed-Off Shotgun

The store manager of the Roseville Quizno’s said he foiled a man trying to rob the sandwich shop at gunpoint by running into the parking lot and screaming, “Call 911, call 911.”

Roseville police said an armed man attempted to rob the 2339 Fairview Avenue Quizno’s at 11 a.m. on New Year’s Eve. A 24-year-old St. Paul resident, Michael Scott Luedtke, .

The store manager, Tom Bui, said he has worked for Quizno’s for eight years. The morning of Dec. 31 he was in his office doing paperwork and talking to his girlfriend on the phone when a loud noise made him look up through the one-way mirror “peep window” above his desk.

“It happened really quick,” he said. “I heard a big crunch and a bunch of screaming, yelling. I thought, ‘Oh my god, my employee dropped something and now they’re arguing.’ So I come out of my office, and I see a guy with a sawed-off shot gun holding my employee by her shirt.”

The employee, a new hire, was paralyzed with fright and unable to open the cash register, Bui said.

“She was young, she just froze up,” he said.

Bui said he wanted to get the gunman out of the store, away from his employees.

“I thought, ‘No way do I want to be here,’ and I ran for help out the door,” Bui said. “I screamed out loud, ‘Call 911,’ and ran all the way out the parking lot out there.”

Bui said the assailant abandoned the robbery and pursued him out the door.

“He saw me running and screaming, and I hit a sand spot, and I wiped out,” Bui said.

When he fell, the sand cut at his skin.

“When you run for your life, you just run,” he said. “I wiped out and my knees both got scraped, my arm, my elbow, just pain everywhere.”

Bui lay prone on the ground when the assailant caught up with him.

“I come flying and he ran behind me, he’s chasing after me, he ran past me and pointed a gun at me,” he said.

Bui said he’ll never forget the moment of waiting, the sawed-off shotgun pointed at his body, the certainty of a bad outcome.

“You look at death, you think, ‘Oh my god, this is it,’ you know,” he said. “You just turn white, it’s blank.”

Then, his assailant said, ‘Pow,’ moved the muzzle away from Bui’s torso, and ran around the corner of the shopping center to a waiting getaway car.

Bui said he stayed shocked and silent for a couple beats before starting to shout again, “Call 911, call 911.”

Police arrived shortly afterward and once they took Bui’s statement, he went home for the day.

“I look at life very different now,” Bui said. “You just get to live for today, live for the moment.”