Natasha LaTour was barely recognizable, her head covered with a beanie and the hood of a large, heavy jacket during the April 2021 pandemic, as she stood in the darkness just a block and a half from her grandmother’s home in Stockton, California.
It was 4:30 a.m. and Natasha, then 46, had parked her bike by the train tracks before planning to spend hours at the local recycling center – where she supplemented her meager income from cleaning with money from returning recyclables .
The area was quiet and deserted as she pulled down her Covid face mask to take a cigarette break, but a train was approaching; Then Natasha heard the crunch of gravel from a footstep – and looked around to see a stranger pointing a gun directly at her.
“Of course I said, ‘What the hell?’ – and there’s a muzzle flash,” Natasha tells Daily Mail.com; bullets started hitting her as the train sped past. “And I remember the first thought I had was, ‘This is pure genius. No one will hear these gunshots.”
Suddenly she was confronted with the man now accused of seven murders after stalking the streets of Oakland and Stockton for 18 months.
The shooter, wearing a dark hoodie with a mask obscuring his face, was “on the street, and I’m at the distance between first and second base, like on an adult (baseball) field,” she said. ‘The train is moving, so I can’t cross the train.
“You can’t turn around and run and give (the shooter) access to the back, your head, your spine, etcetera… so I started moving toward the street, not toward the shooter.
“It was multiple muzzle flashes; you start getting hit, and it feels like marbles, not even thrown hard – and then I fell to the ground,” she says. “I (didn’t) know where this person was… I knew there was no time to pretend he was dead. So I started crawling towards the street.”
She started thinking about her grandmother, an “old Creole lady” from Louisiana who used to sit in her rocking chair praying for her “children’s children.” That was the “first thing I heard when I hit the ground,” she says.
‘As I was crawling, I felt myself getting wet; I couldn’t associate that with blood, but… my breath’s getting a little short. And I remember laying there and saying, ‘Help me!'” she says.
Natasha LaTour, now 50, was shot between eight and 10 times in an unprovoked attack in Stockton, California, in April 2021; suspect Wesley Brownlee is awaiting trial on charges related to her attempted murder and seven other murders
‘And then you just think, ‘This can’t be it. If this is the end, this is insane.”’
Miraculously and thankfully, this was not the end for Natasha, but she would become the only known survivor of the serial killer who terrorized Stockton for eighteen months before the arrest of suspect Wesley Brownlee in October 2022.
Seven men died before the arrest, several homeless and most men of color in Oakland and Stockton. Natasha was also temporarily out of her home at the time and was at the bottom of a decades-long drug addiction.
“I was the only woman shot,” Natasha told DailyMail.com. “He clearly didn’t know I was a woman.”
She was told that surveillance footage, which she still hasn’t seen, shows two people walking toward Natasha on the ground near the railroad tracks as she lay shot.
Nearly three years later, and now under treatment for stage 3 colon cancer – a diagnosis she might never have received had she not sought regular medical treatment after the shooting – Natasha tells it all with remarkable grace and positivity.
“They probably both got scared of each other, like, ‘Who the hell are you?’ and hurried,” she says generously.
No help came, says Natasha — who had never read the Bible or been religious — until she cried out to God.
“I realized I had one more phone call to go,” she tells DailyMail.com. “I said, ‘God, I’m dying.'”
She believes that “as soon as I said that, Jesus came. I’ve never seen it either, but you feel it… you know the feeling when you’re lying with your mother or your grandmother, and it’s kind of chilly, you’re watching TV or whatever, and then you fall asleep – you sleep a little (but) awake enough to feel that blanket coming on you? That was the feeling… and then all the pain disappeared. The pain was gone.
“And then I woke up in the hospital four days later. I wiggled my fingers, wiggled my toes; I knew I wasn’t paralyzed.’
Doctors told her she had been shot between eight and 10 times; Riddled with bullet fragments and shrapnel, it was difficult to determine an exact number. She says the police never visited her in the hospital; her shooting was never discussed by local media at the time. She was released after eleven days and says she became ‘sober effortlessly’ after asking for God’s help again. This spring she will have been clean for three years.
While police may not have devoted many resources to investigating her shooting, Natasha did some investigating on her own – and knew there was no way she had been specifically targeted.
Natasha’s story is featured in a new Tubi program debuting this week; she says she hopes her experience inspires and educates others about forgiveness, healing and faith
“I didn’t owe anyone any money,” she says. ‘It wasn’t a drug deal gone wrong. Homeless people don’t do that to each other. I haven’t slept with anyone’s husband or wife. There’s nothing dirty on my end; I knew it wasn’t personal – and my stuff wasn’t taken. No words were exchanged. So whatever it was, they had the wrong person.
“I went back” to the area where she was shot to ask the local homeless population if anyone had seen or heard anything, she tells DailyMail.com – but “the streets didn’t even know who had done it.”
Unbeknownst to Natasha at the time, 40-year-old Juan Vasquez had been shot and killed by the same alleged assailant six days before her shooting in Oakland. The same day she was attacked, Mervin Harmon was fatally shot in Alameda County.
It would be over a year before the next shooting, when 35-year-old Paul Haw was murdered in Stockton on July 8, 2022. Salvador Debudey Jr., 43, and Jonathan Rodriguez Hernandez, 21, were killed the following month in Stockton. .
It was only after two more men were murdered in September – Juan Cruz, 52, and Lawrence Lopez Sr, 54 – that police announced they believed the murders were linked and that a serial killer was on the loose.
Brownlee was arrested on October 15, 2022 – charged with seven counts of murder and the attempted murder of Natasha. Until her cancer treatment – and when “evidence shot out of her body” in the form of shrapnel that tore its way through her tissue – Natasha made every appearance prior to the trial of Brownlee, who has pleaded not guilty.
She was sober and working for Amazon when she first heard the news in 2022 that police now believed a serial killer was operating in the Stockton area. Natasha went to the bathroom and prayed, she says; she felt like her shooting was connected, so she asked God again — who answered in the affirmative, she says. She went back to the police and went outside too.
“I’m doing this and I don’t know if the ballistics match; all I know is that God told me… and it was true,” she tells DailyMail.com. “I even had people in my own family say, ‘Your name and your face? He hasn’t even been caught yet.”
However, Natasha felt protected and felt that sharing her story was the right thing to do – and the suspect was subsequently arrested within weeks.
“That’s when the public knew it was real,” she says. ‘People then started looking for this person. The reward rose higher than Ted Bundy’s – and then he got caught.”
But long after the shooting, Natasha “had nightmares every time I went to sleep.”
“I would say at night, but that’s not the case,” she says. ‘Every time I closed my eyes I was shot. And the problem with that was that I would end up with this weapon, and I’m holding it over this faceless person, because I never saw the face. And then I throw the gun… and then wake up.”
She was strengthened by the knowledge that she had indeed fallen victim to a serial killer – that it was not a personal attack, as she had thought.
“People can say, wrong place, wrong time,” she says. “I think it was the perfect place at the perfect time because I’m sober – effortlessly sober.”
She has reconnected with her family, is happily in a new relationship and even credits the near-death experience with possibly saving her life in the form of her cancer diagnosis, which she received last year. In the depths of their addiction, she says, most people don’t even go to the doctor; she may never have known she had colon cancer.
Through it all, she says, she thinks about the victims who didn’t survive; she had met two of them in person before the attacks.
“I can’t be their voice, but I know I draw strength from them,” she says. “They helped with my sobriety at first – how could I use it if they weren’t there? I am the one who is saved… I have to live my life differently.”
She hopes her story teaches people about forgiveness: “I don’t want the death penalty for him,” she says about the suspect. But she’s still working to find that forgiveness for the police, who she says “have personally apologized to me.”
Natasha, pictured as a child, was shot just a block and a half from the house her Creole grandmother moved to in Stockton after leaving Louisiana in 1972, two years before Natasha was born. She is now 50 and battling cancer
“Look who he (was killing),” Natasha says of the suspect. ‘Homeless drug addicts.’
She notes the lack of investigation or police interaction after her shooting, saying it was as if her attack “didn’t exist… don’t do anything, she’s just a drug addict.”
“What they expected was that I would still be that (fucked up) person,” she says. “And that’s not the case.”
She wants her survival experience to teach many lessons, just as she has endured almost unbelievable trials. Her story can be seen this week in the new Tubi program Evil Among Us: Surviving A Serial Killer.
“I want people to get scared and get a colonoscopy,” she says. “I want people to be angry about gun violence. I want people to be angry at bad police officers and their work.
‘I want them to see everything. I want to change the world a little, and I want to inspire someone.’