A student at California State University, Fresno was saved from serious injury or worse earlier this week when an assailant shot him during a robbery and his iPhone blocked the bullet.
The incident occurred at approximately 11 p.m. on Monday night at the Campus Edge apartment complex about two blocks from the Fresno State campus, reports The Fresno Bee.
The unknown attacker followed the also-unidentified victim into the complex and toward his apartment. At the front door, the attacker uttered something unintelligible and made his move.
The gate to the Campus Edge complex was unlocked.
“He took a gun, after he took the backpack of my roommate, and he shot him in the leg but my roommate is very lucky,” Faris Alotaibi, who shares an apartment with victim, told local ABC affiliate KFSN-TV.
A well-placed iPhone in the Fresno State student’s pocket hindered the path of the bullet. The phone was more or less destroyed as a result. But the student’s leg, groin, etc. were saved and, in fact, completely unharmed. No blood, nothing.
“He said, ‘It saved my life,'” Alotaibi told Fresno NBC affiliate KSEE.
The gunman did manage to take the student’s laptop bag and the silver Hewlett-Packard laptop it contained.
The mugged student has already decided he’s had enough of Fresno State.
“He is no longer interested in Fresno, he wants to drop all the courses and he will never come back,” Alotaibi told KFSN.
An employee at the Campus Edge apartment admitted that the complex gate had been left unlocked for weeks and that management had known about it. The employee blamed a keycard glitch. The glitch has been fixed since the shooting.
Many students — including Alotaibi — don’t feel safe after the gunshots rattled the apartments close to campus.
“The whole neighborhood, Bulldog Lane, is filled with gang members, drug addicts and bad people,” he told the station.
Fresno police are looking for a suspect described as 5 feet, 10 inches tall and about 170 pounds. He was wearing a dark ski mask on his face and dark clothing, according to the Bee.
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