He’d seen the Metro trains gliding back and forth above-ground when his family landed at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport.
“He was fascinated,” said Cathe Armstrong, his grandmother.
Then came Sunday — time for the boy’s first subway ride.
But in an age when mass shootings are far too common (and, in fact, 17 people had been shot and five more injured in a brawl at a Trenton, N.J., art fair the night before), the boy’s ride would be one of more fear than wonder.
Cathe Armstrong and her family — including her sister, her son, Tucker, and his 2-year-old brother, Griffin — had set out on the Metro so the boys could take in the view over the Potomac River.
It was about 5:30 p.m. when the family walked down a broken escalator at Gallery Place and saw it would be a 10-minute wait for the Yellow Line.
“We were trying to entertain the kids by walking back and forth,” Armstrong said, when they heard what they — and a lot of others in the station — thought were gunshots.
Armstrong counted six; her sister, eight.
Her son scooped up the two kids and said, “‘Run!” The family ran back up the escalator and into the station’s elevator.
“There were so many people in there, I didn’t think the elevator would lift,” Armstrong said.
“People are not behaving,” she explained to the grandkids. “So we’re going to leave.”
As it turned out, it wasn’t another shooting spree — just firecrackers set off by thoughtless kids.
Armstrong is visiting from Columbus, Ohio; her son, his wife and their kids just moved from Phoenix to D.C.’s Palisades neighborhood last month.
But it wasn’t just jumpy tourists and newcomers who ran for their lives. In a Green Line train that was stopped at the station, Sarah Ferris watched the pandemonium. A native of Newtown, Conn., she naturally thought of the 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School that left 26 dead.
“Suddenly, a storm of people bolted down the stairs and escalators and began stampeding across on the lower platform,” she wrote in an email.
“Every person on our train got on the ground, ducking under the windows, without a clue what was happening.”
Metro says announcements were made to reassure people in the station that no shots had been fired. But no one clued in the passengers, who’d hit the ground and stayed down until the train stopped at Mount Vernon Square.
Told a couple days later that the sounds had only been firecrackers, Armstrong said that in a more innocent time she would have thought, “ ‘Oh, it’s near the 4th of July and someone has fireworks!’ Now, my first thought is, ‘Oh, my! Gunshots! And we’re enclosed in this tunnel — get out!’ ”
Tucker had questions afterward about his first ride, Armstrong said.
“Why was everybody screaming?”And, “Are trains scary?”
Reach Kery Murakami at kery.murakami@washpost.com. Follow him @theDCrider.