The woman had no idea what was going on around her.
Anyone who’s tried noise-canceling headphones knows they can be pretty effective.
They’re great for drowning out all sorts of noises, like crying kids or grumbling parents, and they definitely come in handy sometimes.
But TikToker Christina (@movementwithtina) found out just how powerful her Apple AirPods were in a rather shocking way:
Last year, she posted a video from one of her regular runs, and the text on the screen said:
“POV your AirPods are on noise-canceling and your phone is on DND so you don’t realize you just ran through an active shooting.”
In the video, Christina is jogging down a residential street. You can hear sirens blaring loudly in the background.
She even gives a thumbs up to the camera, totally clueless about what was happening around her.
“The sirens in the back and my blissful unawareness is sending me. But for real this was actually really intense and I’m so sorry for those injured and everyone impacted,” she wrote in the video caption.
Around the same time in Atlanta, police were on a massive hunt for a suspected gunman named Deion Patterson.
Deputy Chief Charles Hampton of the Atlanta Police said that Patterson, who was 24 at the time, went to Northside Medical Midtown around noon.
The TikToker had no idea.
TikTok / @movementwithtina
There, he shot a 38-year-old woman dead and injured four others.
After the shooting, Patterson fled on foot, then stole a pickup truck that was left unattended.
The truck’s license plate was later spotted by cameras in Cobb County, about 20 minutes away.
Eventually, he was caught inside a gated condominium complex more than 10 miles north from where the shooting occurred.
Atlanta’s Mayor Andre Dickens referred to the event as a ‘horrible act of gun violence’, and he emphasized:
“We need more actions [for] the rights of our citizens to go about their lives, to be able to go to a doctor’s office, to a supermarket, to a gas station or to their school without the threat of being gunned down.”
Patterson faced charges of murder and four counts of aggravated assault.
In a follow-up video, Christina addressed a comment from a viewer who joked, “I’m sorry but AirPods noise cancellation is not that good lol.”
She explained what happened, and talking about it still seemed ‘crazy’ to her.
Christina opened up about the situation.
TikTok / @movementwithtina
“Basically, I live in midtown Atlanta, and I went on a 5k run,” she shared.
“I took my usual route and put my phone on Do Not Disturb – I always do that when I go running.”
Christina added: “I had my AirPods on noise-canceling because I was running through residential streets, and there’s always lots of people out there, and I never had any issues on those streets.
“To get to the residential streets, I had to run through main parts of the city to get to those parts. So I ran past caution tape, a bunch of cops, ambulances, all this kind of stuff – swarms of people outside.”
She admitted she was fairly accustomed to seeing such scenes in Atlanta, though ‘maybe not on that level’, and just assumed it was some construction or a car accident.
“So I kept running,” Christina recalled.
“Then once I realized there were more cops going down the residential streets, clearly they were looking for the shooter. That’s when I kind of started thinking something was up.
“I took a quick break and I looked at my phone, and I saw my boyfriend had tried to call me and had texted me multiple times saying like, ‘Hey, it’s on your route, please answer’.”
Christina said she was ‘totally fine’ and decided to run back home a different way