Good Samaritan's gesture ends in hail of bullets, long road to recovery

On Aug. 7, Paul Werder, described by his wife as an inveterate good Samaritan, approached a homeless man who appeared hurt along a road on Pittsburgh’s North Side.

They stood about 2 feet apart.

“Are you okay?” Werder, 73, asked. “Can I help you?”

The answer came through the crack of a pistol.

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

Werder was hit in his left foot.

He turned to run. Instead, he collapsed.

The man then shot Werder in his legs, buttocks and pelvis — at least seven times, police said — all at point-blank range.

Just before 4 p.m., Pittsburgh police pulled up at the scene in the 3700 block of Brighton Road in the city’s Brighton Heights neighborhood.

They wrestled the gun from the shooter’s hands. They later wrote in a report that he appeared to be on drugs.

One officer shocked the suspect twice with a Taser before handcuffing him.

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

Werder’s shin bone “was broken just like a stick,” Yasmin Werder said. Surgeons implanted a plate in his left foot and reconstructed his ankle.

“Luckily, he was never hit in any of his vital organs,” his wife said. “If he had hit his head or his chest, he would have been gone.”

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

Pittsburgh police charged Angus Sanders Jr., 47, with aggravated assault and other crimes.

He remained in the Allegheny County Jail on Friday. Judges twice have denied him bail.

A helping habit

The kind gesture that ended with Werder being shot wasn’t the first time the Elizabeth Township man played the role of good Samaritan.

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

Several years ago, she said, Werder stopped to pick up a man standing on a McKeesport street in the middle of a blistering snowstorm. The man had no coat, only a hoodie, she said. The man directed Werder throughout the Mon Valley until they arrived at a house in Duquesne, where Werder dropped him off.

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

“You do this again, I’m divorcing you!” she said.

Last year, Werder did something similar. He pulled over when he saw a woman who appeared to be bleeding. It turned out she was eating a red-colored candy. Werner gave the woman a lift to the McKees Rocks area.

“I think there’s goodness in everyone, really,” Yasmin Werder, 65, said. “But I don’t want to find out, like Paul did, that some guys 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 some 35 years ago.

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

The Werders both are seeking justice.

“I really don’t want this guy out of wherever they’re going to put him because his next victim, they’re not going to live,” Yasmin Werder said.

But, she also stressed she prays for the man who shot her husband.

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

Prison time

Sanders’ criminal record dates to at least 1995.

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

That conviction means he legally is not permitted to carry a gun, Pittsburgh police said.

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

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

Two years later, Sanders was found guilty at a nonjury trial of making terroristic threats and committing simple assault. A judge sentenced him to six to 12 months in prison, followed by 18 months on probation.

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

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

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

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

Police also recovered an empty, 30-round gun magazine and a 9mm pistol.

The handgun had been reported stolen out of Swissvale in January 2023.

Relearning to walk

Werder has called Pittsburgh home for four decades.

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

The Werders purchased an investment home in Brighton Heights a decade ago so their youngest child could attend school in Downtown Pittsburgh.

On the day of the attack, Werder was repairing the kitchen in that home, his wife said. He was headed there shortly before 4 p.m. after running errands.

Werder loves keeping busy, his wife said. Since retiring during the pandemic from a career that included 28 years at Mellon Bank and 10 years at PNC Bank, he always itches for projects.

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

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

In addition to slowing down, Werder will also need to learn to walk again.

Despite intense treatment, he still can’t apply much weight to his damaged left foot.

Werder has a long road ahead, including intense physical therapy sessions every day of the week. That’s a tough pill for an athletic go-getter used to “running laps around a 40-year-old,” Yasmin Werder said with a laugh.

“When you go for a bike ride with Paul, it’s not going to be a mile, it’s going to be 5, 10 miles,” she said. “It doesn’t matter the weather, Paul is there.”

Baby steps

Yasmin Werder said she’s tried to remain strong for her family as they’ve weathered the last 16 days. She likes to remind friends that she comes from a long line of strong women.

She has tuned out much of the news. She said she’s “been trying to stay away” from cellphone footage witnesses captured of the shooting. Police also have surveillance video from that afternoon.

Yasmin Werder maintains she and Paul have everything they need.

“We’ve always been blessed. Whatever we have is a blessing,” she told TribLive. “Everybody has been just so totally amazing, so unbelievable. I don’t know if this gratitude can be put into words.

“This really has awoken him, knowing how close he was to not being here, 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 baby steps.”