It's been described as a defining moment in the city of Wollongong's life.
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Twenty years on, Keira Street shooting victim Martin Anstee retraced his steps on Friday.
"First of all I thought I'd been hit by a backfire of a car, because it sounded like a car backfiring," he said.
"Then I went, 'oh, no, I think I've been shot'."
On February 22, 1999, as the Wollongong street was bustling, in broad daylight a lone gunman turned the public street into a bloody shooting gallery.
First there was a warning shot. People froze. Seconds later Vedran Ravnjak, a 33-year-old, lay in the gutter clutching his stomach.
He had been sprayed with pellets from the gunman’s second shot. He was dead.
I got 32 pellets in me - 29 of which are still there. I got a whole pile of buckshot all through me, but nothing hit anything important, which was fortunate.
Nine innocent bystanders were wounded, including an 11-year-old boy.
The gunman, wielding a shortened double-barrel shotgun, was Mr Ravnjak’s former friend, Zlatan Popovic.
Mr Anstee had just finished lunch at the Monsoon Restaurant with his colleague David Underhill when he was hit by a spray of shotgun pellets.
"It was busy, hectic, lots of people and very noisy," Mr Anstee said.
In an upstairs office across the road, St John Ambulance Illawarra branch co-ordinator Ann Howell, instructor Ian Grant and a group of first-aid course participants looked on in horror.
"We were fortunate that they were across the road… And two ambulances just happened to be here at the same time when they let a couple of shots off," Mr Anstee said.
Mr Underhill was just seconds from also being shot when he left the restaurant.
When he emerged he found Mr Anstee slumped on the footpath, bleeding from back wounds.
"I got 32 pellets in me - 29 of which are still there," Mr Anstee said.
"I got a whole pile of buckshot all through me, but nothing hit anything important, which was fortunate."
Mr Anstee, CEO of PCL Money/Illawarra Home Loans for the past 30 years, had a staff lunch on Friday at Mylan, the site of that unfortunate experience. "It's to celebrate that we're still here and still going," he said.
Although saying it was a "memorable" occasion - "I don't know how else to describe working out you've been shot and you're not really sure whether you're going to live or die" - 20 years on, the incident doesn't really play any role in his life.
"I'm not scarred," he said.
"Other people unfortunately didn't deal with it the same way I did, and I feel sorry for some of those folks who suffered dreadfully.
"I think there were other people that were far worse off than me."