Shooting Victim Speaks Out About Frightening Experience

DULUTH - A business owner was shot in the chest just four days ago, and said adrenaline is what kept him fighting for his life.

“Give us all the money,” Colin Mackin said as he painfully remembers the incident Monday evening. “Then all of a sudden there's a gun in my face.”

Instead of spending Christmas at home with his family, the owner of ILF Smart Phone Clinic on London Road was recovering in the hospital after police said robbers shot him,

For being shot in the chest just days ago, Mackin was surprisingly in good spirits and realized just how lucky he is to be alive.

For Mackin, the day of the shooting was business as usual.

“Like a normal day,” Mackin remembered. “It started to pick up a bit I had a lot of costumers in the store.”

Just after 7:00 p.m. things took a turn for the worse.

“There's two guys that just walked in and they're both wearing hoods, and v for vendetta masks,” he explained.

He simply asked if he could help them when he said they demanded money and ordered him to get on the ground.

Mackin had the phone slipped underneath him and was trying to dial 911 on the key pad.

Unsuccessful in the call, the intruders took the phone and attempted to tie Mackin up with tape.

“I didn't really want to admit that the situation was happening,” Mackin explained. “So I pulled my hands away like no we're not doing that.”

He got up and tried to enable his store's security system to alert authorities, but Mackin said the robbers hit him on the head multiple times causing two staples to close up the cut.

The intruders then fired two warning shots.

Mackin said one intruder dropped their gun, and it was sitting on the steps. He then picked up the gun and pointed it at the suspect. Mackin realized the safety was on and that it was a BB gun.

The intruders walked out the front door with his valuable business computer. 

Mackin followed the two men out the front door. He put the man with the gun in the sleeper hold. The man got away then turned towards Mackin.

“At that point he stood up, and probably like a foot away from me,” Mackin remembers. “Put the gun into my chest and pulled the trigger which hit me.”

Miraculously, the bullet went clean through his chest not hitting any major arteries, just skimming the side of his lung.

“The doctors even said that people get shot in the chest, by and large they die,” Mackin recalled.

Now, Mackin sits spending Christmas in his hospital bed recovering from a wound that should have killed him, and telling a story he is lucky he lived to tell.

“You don't fight evil with evil,” he said. “You overcome evil with good.”

The two men who robbed Mackin's shop were arrested Tuesday.

They are set to be charged Friday.