James “Jimmy” Maldonado woke up in a hospital bed asking for his wife.

Shot in the shoulder area, Maldonado survived Monday’s shooting rampage, but his wife, Alyssa Gunn-Maldonado, did not.

Detectives visited his bedside Monday night and told him that Alyssa had died.

“I’m devastated about losing my wife and my friend,” Maldonado told The Denver Gazette in a phone interview from his hospital bed at Denver Health. “I’m just really sad and heartbroken.”

Maldonado, Gunn-Maldonado and shop owner Alicia Cardenas were inside Sol Tribe Tattoo and Piercing when a gunman entered the shop and started firing. Cardenas and Gunn-Maldenado were killed.

Maldonado, a piercer at the shop, suffered a broken clavical and ribs. On Wednesday, he was able to walk for the first time since the shooting.

“He’s improving,” said Gabriel Lopez, Maldonado’s brother.

Maldonado was doing a piercing just after 5 p.m. Monday when a man walked through the front door. Next, he heard what he described as several loud bangs.

“It happened so fast. He didn’t say a word,” Maldonado said. “He shot my boss, he shot my wife and then he shot me last.”

What happened next is like a scene from a horror movie. Maldonado said he was bleeding profusely down the front of his shirt as he rolled underneath a bench. He thinks the shooter thought he was dead, giving him and his clients time to run out the back door of the shop and into an alley where they hid behind a car.

But then, the shooter followed them outside. “We could see his shoes. He walked around,” Maldonado said.

He and his clients held their breath as they waited until the gunman turned and went back into the tattoo shop. “I didn’t know I was shot. I was in shock,” said Maldonado, who added that people at a nearby business ushered them inside to safety.

Maldonado had a run-in with the gunman 12 years ago over a difference of opinion, but he doesn’t know if he was a target. He doesn’t think this was a random shooting.

“This was premeditated,” he said. “It was planned.”

Maldonado said the man who shot him looked different from when he first knew him over a decade ago. He described the gunman as having long hair “in a way (that) looked like a hippie. But when I last saw him in 2018, he was almost militaristic.”

Sol Tribe was the first attack in a series of shootings that spanned two cities and left five people dead. In addition to Cardenas, 44, and Gunn-Maldonado, 35, the gunman shot and killed Michael Swinyard, 67, in a high rise apartment building at 1201 Williams St. near Cheesman Park. Another tattoo artist, 38-year-old Danny Scofield, was shot and killed at the Lucky 13 tattoo shop at Kipling and Colfax in Lakewood. Sarah Steck, a 28-year-old hotel clerk and aspiring artist, was the last to die before the gunman was fatally shot by Lakewood police officer Ashley Ferris.

Ferris was shot in the stomach but is expected to make a full recovery. Of the seven victims, she and Maldonado are the only two to survive.

Joe Maldonado, Jimmy’s younger brother, told The Denver Gazette: “He’s a strong person. When the doctors asked him his level of pain, he said ‘6.’ Most normal people would say ’12.’”

He added: “Jimmy is just so sad. He knows his life is changed forever.”

Jimmy Maldonado said he’s conflicted about going home to an empty house: “I hate being in the hospital, but I’m also scared to leave because I have to deal with life.”

A GoFundMe account for Jimmy Maldonado and his 12-year-old son had raised $148,000 as of early Wednesday evening.