On August 7, Paul Werder, described by his wife as a die-hard Good Samaritan, approached an apparently injured homeless man on a street on Pittsburgh’s north side.

They stood about two meters apart.

“Are you okay?” asked the 73-year-old Werder. “Can I help you?”

The answer came with a pistol shot.

“The guy immediately pulled out a gun,” said Werder’s wife Yasmin Werder on Friday. “And he just kept shooting.”

Werder was hit on the left foot.

He turned to run away. Instead, he collapsed.

The man then shot Werder in the legs, buttocks and pelvis – according to police, at least seven times, always from close range.

Shortly before 4 p.m., Pittsburgh police arrived at the scene in the 3700 block of Brighton Road in the Brighton Heights neighborhood.

They took the gun away from the shooter. They later wrote in a report that he appeared to be under the influence of drugs.

An officer shocked the suspect twice with a taser before handcuffing him.

Paramedics took Werder, who was bleeding profusely, to Allegheny General Hospital on the North Side. He needed five units of blood, his wife said.

Werder’s shinbone was “broken like a stick,” said Yasmin Werder. The surgeons implanted a plate in his left foot and reconstructed his ankle.

“Fortunately, he was not hit in any of his vital organs,” his wife said. “If he had been hit in the head or chest, he would have been dead.”

Werder’s family hopes that he will be released from hospital next week.

Pittsburgh police charged 47-year-old Angus Sanders Jr. with aggravated assault and other crimes.

As of Friday, he was still in the Allegheny County Jail. Judges have twice denied him bail.

A helpful habit

The friendly gesture that ended with Werder being shot was not the first time the man from Elizabeth Township played the role of the Good Samaritan.

Werder’s offer to help a stranger was representative of the retired banker’s attitude to life, his wife told TribLive.

Several years ago, she said, Werder stopped to pick up a man who was standing on a road in McKeesport in the middle of a heavy snowstorm. The man was wearing no coat, just a hoodie, she said. The man directed Werder through the Mon Valley until they came to a house in Duquesne, where Werder dropped him off.

When Werder came home an hour later, his wife was not happy.

“If you do that again, I’ll divorce you!” she said.

Last year, Werder did something similar. He stopped when he saw a woman who appeared to be bleeding. It turned out that she was eating a red candy. Werner took the woman to the McKees Rocks area.

“I really believe that there is good in every person,” says 65-year-old Yasmin Werder. “But I don’t want to find out like Paul that some people don’t have good intentions.”

Yasmin Werder, an artist and, like her husband, a retired banker, was born in Puerto Rico and lived in New York City before moving to Pittsburgh about 35 years ago.

“This world is so full of hate – and fighting hate with hate doesn’t work,” she told TribLive.

Both Werders demand justice.

“I really don’t want to take this guy out of wherever they take him, because they won’t survive his next victim,” said Yasmin Werder.

But she also emphasized that she was praying for the man who shot her husband.

“I pray that he gets the help he really needs,” she said.

Prison sentence

Sanders’ criminal record goes back to at least 1995.

This year, the Pittsburgh-area man pleaded guilty to aggravated assault and recklessly endangering another person, court records show, and a judge sentenced him to six to 12 months in prison.

Because of this conviction, he is legally prohibited from carrying a weapon, Pittsburgh police said.

In 2004, Sanders pleaded guilty to drug charges and robbery. He was sentenced to two to five years in prison.

He was incarcerated at the State Correctional Institution–Cresson, a now-closed facility in the Altoona area, until late 2009, a state corrections spokeswoman said Friday.

Two years later, Sanders was found guilty of terroristic threats and simple assault in a non-jury trial. A judge sentenced him to six to 12 months in prison, followed by 18 months probation.

The Allegheny County Public Defender’s Office, which represents Sanders, declined to comment on Werder’s case on Friday.

Witnesses told Pittsburgh police that Sanders had been in the area for at least a year. Some saw him sleeping in the foliage near a Rite Aid pharmacy on Brighton Road.

After the shooting, police found at least four bullet casings near the entrance to the Lynn Williams Apartments parking lot, which is across Goe Avenue from the pharmacy.

Officers found some of Sanders’ belongings: more than 20 pill bottles and numerous loose pills, tobacco pouches, a red bandana, a lighter and a pair of brown boots.

Police also seized an empty 30-round magazine and a 9mm pistol.

The gun was reported stolen in Swissvale in January 2023.

Learning to walk again

Pittsburgh has been Werder’s home for four decades.

He and his wife married in 1987 and raised three children – now adults between the ages of 25 and 35 – across the Monongahela River from where he was attacked earlier this month.

The Werders bought an investment property in Brighton Heights ten years ago so that their youngest child could attend school in downtown Pittsburgh.

On the day of the attack, Werder was repairing the kitchen in his house, his wife said. He was on his way there shortly before 4 p.m. after running some errands.

Werder loves to stay busy, his wife said, and since retiring during the pandemic from a career that included 28 years at Mellon Bank and 10 years at PNC Bank, he’s always on the hunt for projects.

“The lesson for him? He has to stop all this work,” said Yasmin Werder. “All these years I’ve said: ‘You have to stop and smell the roses.'”

“Now our lives are going to change completely,” she added. “And that’s OK.”

In addition to speed, Werder also has to learn to run again.

Despite intensive treatment, he is still unable to bear much weight on his injured left foot.

Werner has a long road ahead of him, which includes intensive physiotherapy sessions every day of the week. That’s a tough pill to swallow for a sporty daredevil who is used to “running laps around a 40-year-old,” Yasmin Werder said with a laugh.

“When you go on a bike ride with Paul, it’s not one mile, it’s five or ten miles,” she said. “The weather doesn’t matter, Paul is there.”

Small steps

Yasmin Werder said she has tried to stay strong for her family as she has endured the past 16 days. She likes to remind her friends that she comes from a long line of strong women.

She has largely ignored the news, saying she was “trying to stay away from the cellphone footage of the shooting” that witnesses captured. Police also have surveillance video from that afternoon.

Yasmin Werder claims that she and Paul have everything they need.

“We’ve always been blessed. Whatever we have is a blessing,” she told TribLive. “Everyone has just been so incredible, so incredible. I don’t know if words can express the gratitude.”

“That really woke him up, knowing how close he was to not being here anymore, to dying,” she added. “I don’t know if he’s going to go back to his old self (and) I don’t know what’s going to happen. But I have to take small steps.”