Coverage spread: 2 sources — 1 left · 1 right
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Where they agree
- A gunman, identified as 24-year-old Chad Williams, killed three people and wounded seven at a Twin Falls, Idaho In-N-Out Burger on Saturday around 2:30 p.m. before killing himself.
- Both outlets confirm one victim was a female In-N-Out employee, with the Guardian naming her as 23-year-old Ashley Garibay of Stockton, California.
- The attack occurred at a newly opened restaurant location, and people connected to the store (an employee-in-training and a worker) were directly affected.
- Local authorities and family members alike describe the chaos and fear in the immediate aftermath of the shooting.
Where they differ
- The New York Post centers its story on the Ahern family’s ordeal waiting to hear from their daughter and their criticism of In-N-Out’s lack of an emergency-contact protocol.
- The Guardian centers its story on bystander Jordan Salinas, who returned fire on the gunman, and includes police statements crediting him and an off-duty officer with limiting casualties.
- Only the Guardian provides a detailed casualty breakdown (two discharged, three stable, two critical) and links the incident to a prior 2025 Boise mall shooting.
- Only the Post raises the question of corporate responsibility, with the victim’s family questioning why In-N-Out didn’t notify emergency contacts during the shooting.
What happened in Twin Falls
A gunman opened fire at a newly opened In-N-Out Burger in Twin Falls, Idaho, at around 2:30 p.m. on Saturday. Police identified the shooter as 24-year-old Chad Williams. He killed three people and wounded seven others before dying of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Of the wounded, two were treated at a hospital and released, three were listed in stable condition, and two remained in critical condition, according to police.
Twin Falls Police Chief Matthew Hicks and county Sheriff Jack Johnson credited an off-duty police officer and a civilian bystander, 35-year-old Jordan Salinas, with driving the gunman away from the crowded restaurant and likely preventing further deaths. One of the victims killed has been identified through social media posts by loved ones as 23-year-old Ashley Garibay of Stockton, California, an employee at the recently opened restaurant. In-N-Out president Lynsi Snyder separately confirmed that a female employee was among those killed.
The bystander who returned fire
Salinas told the Idaho Statesman he and his girlfriend had stopped at the restaurant for lunch on their way to a horseback riding date when he heard rapid gunfire and saw people running. He said his response was “automatic” and “mechanical”: he drew a suppressed semi-automatic pistol from a shoulder holster and ran toward the sound rather than away from it. He described watching Williams, positioned near the drive-through window, raise a rifle and fire at cars before Salinas returned fire with both hands. Williams, he said, reacted once bullets were coming from both directions.
Salinas, who works full time as a caregiver for his wheelchair-using brother, said he had trained seriously with firearms since a 2025 mall shooting in Boise — about two hours from Twin Falls — that killed two people and wounded four. He said he felt no fear during the confrontation, crediting a four-step method from his training: observe, orient, decide, act. Police said Salinas and the off-duty officer’s actions helped push Williams away from the scene, limiting casualties; both Hicks and Johnson publicly called them heroes who saved lives.
A family’s agonizing wait
Separately, the family of a 24-year-old West Covina, California woman described the terror of not knowing whether their daughter had survived. She had traveled to Twin Falls as part of an “all-star team” sent to train new staff ahead of the restaurant’s opening. Her parents, Nikki and Michael Ahern, learned of the shooting from a Citizen app alert and waited for a call that never came, because their daughter had fled without her phone. She eventually reached them by borrowing a friend’s phone, telling her mother repeatedly, “mommy, I’m alive,” according to an account given to CBS Los Angeles. Her father asked if police had arrived and if she was safe; she confirmed she was, but told him a co-worker had been shot. The Aherns said the uncertainty felt like “being powerless” and questioned why In-N-Out did not have a system to notify employees’ emergency contacts during the crisis. As of the report, their daughter had no phone and was expected to fly home to Southern California on Monday.
How the two accounts differ
The two reports focus on different people caught up in the same attack. The New York Post’s account centers on the Ahern family’s experience — the fear of not hearing from their daughter, her account of a coworker being shot, and their criticism of In-N-Out’s lack of an emergency-contact protocol. The Guardian’s account instead focuses on Jordan Salinas, detailing his background, his training history tied to the earlier Boise mall shooting, and the police department’s on-record praise for his intervention. The Guardian also supplies the identity of one victim, Ashley Garibay, and a fuller casualty breakdown from police, details not present in the Post’s report.
The broader picture
The shooting adds to a string of mass-casualty attacks in the region; Salinas explicitly linked his own firearms preparedness to the 2025 Boise mall shooting that killed two people. Officials in Twin Falls, a city of roughly 56,000, framed the intervention by Salinas and the off-duty officer as central to preventing more deaths, a rare instance of law enforcement publicly crediting an armed civilian bystander in a mass shooting. Questions raised by victims’ families — including how companies communicate with workers’ relatives during active emergencies — remain unresolved, as does the full investigation into Williams’s motive, which was not addressed in either account.
Sources
Featured photo: Gh5046 at English Wikipedia via Wikimedia Commons (Public domain)