Many fans heading to Nationals Park for Sunday’s game said they were not too worried about safety after the shooting outside the gates Saturday night.
Shelton Adams, who goes by Bob around Nationals Park, was at the park Saturday night: “I was scared that someone was going to try to knock me down because they were running.”
Adams said he’s been to more than 1,000 games at Nationals Park, and hasn’t missed one “in a couple of years,” and that the shooting wasn’t stopping him from heading to the park.
Don Wiseman, who grew up in D.C., and was ready to go find his seat, said he was safe. “Nothing was going to stop us from coming,” Wiseman said. “We’re not going to let anything that occurred outside deter us from coming inside, no.”
Hubert Fry and his wife, Ann, came from Springfield, Virginia, to watch the Nationals.
“We are concerned about things. But from what I’ve read, I knew that there’d be increased police presence and security as you’d expect after something like that,” Fry said.
He said the shooting wasn’t going to stop him from watching the game with his grandchildren. And Fry called the chance to the see the end of the canceled game before the one he had tickets to “a little added bonus.”
Jane Kisselbach, who was in town from Montana visiting her children and grandchildren, said she felt safe.
“Probably there’s no safer time to come here with increased police,” Kisselbach said, echoing the sentiments of Nationals manager Dave Martinez.
Joseph Rigutto drove from Frederick, Maryland, for a chance to watch the Nationals play — saying “a friend of ours had some extra tickets and he offered them to us and of course I accepted” — and feels as if Nationals Park is a safe place to watch a baseball game.
“It sounded like being in the stadium was safer than sending people out in the street, but I don’t know,” Rigutto said.
The San Diego Padres defeated the Washington Nationals 10-4 in Sunday’s completion of Saturday night’s game.
