He beat back death. 

Jaquione Johnson was among the bullet-riddled carnage splayed on the freezer floor of a Wendy’s basement in New York City’s Queens borough a quarter century ago. 

He was one of seven innocents left for dead by two trigger-happy robbers, who reaped about $2,400 and a gold eagle coin from the eatery’s safe.  

“I did die,” the now 43-year-old told the Sun on Friday, one day before the 25th anniversary of what became known as the “Wendy’s Massacre.” “Then I came back to life.”

On that night, Mr. Johnson was the last of the seven captive Wendy’s workers to be shot in the head, execution-style, by John Taylor and his accomplice, Craig Godineaux. (Taylor, who once worked at the very same Wendy’s before he was transferred to another restaurant, was convicted at trial; and Godineaux pleaded guilty. Both are serving life sentences in two separate New York State prisons.)

Despite being hit point bank by a round that he says pierced his frontal lobe, shattered his nose, and became lodged in his mouth — knocking out a tooth — somehow it wasn’t curtains for Mr. Johnson. 

He survived one of the most heinous and cold-blooded slaughters in New York’s history, on that tragic evening of May 24, 2000. 

After nearly an hour unconscious, with the villains gone, Mr. Johnson’s co-worker, Patricio Castro, who’d also been shot in the head, came to and saved the both of them when he dialed 911. 

“We’re in the basement,” the young man mumbled to the dispatcher through his bullet-shot cheeks, according to the New York Times. “We’re locked in.” 

Mr. Castro then mustered enough strength to drag Mr. Johnson to the front counter of the fast food chain on Flushing’s bustling Main Street to await the calvary. 

The hero recently marveled at his own superhuman strength at the time, telling PIX 11: “I have no idea how I did it.”  

Mr. Johnson recalled how Mr. Castro’s heroics came while “working only there three weeks before this happened.”

Summoned to a Death Trap 

The bloodletting was swift. 

Mr. Johnson said he had been performing a wide range of duties during his closing shift. That night he worked the grill, rang up customers on the register, and fixed sandwiches.  

He did everything but manage the small staff. That title was held by 27-year-old Jean Auguste. 

It was nearly 11 p.m., and as the eatery served its last customer, Mr. Johnson took his superior’s direction to do some “pre-cleaning”. 

The plan was to knock out the closing duties such as emptying the trash, wiping down the tables, and placing the chairs on top of tables, all so that “we could get out of there early that day.”

And Mr. Johnson, who had been employed at the Wendy’s for almost a year, would multitask when he precleaned, sampling some rapping lyrics while he tidied the joint.

“I went to go lock up and when I wanted to lock the door — I didn’t know that there was somebody in the bathroom.”

It was Godineaux. 

Mr. Johnson was taken aback when he came out, noting, “I didn’t know he was there. Then me and him was talking. He had heard me freestyling and so he was like, ‘Do you know any rappers? We need rappers!’”

“I was like, ‘Nah, I don’t. I have a cousin and she knows some of them.’”

Godineaux and the fast food worker kicked around some of the rap artists they enjoyed. 

The next moment Mr. Johnson and the rest of the staff were prompted by a message over the intercom. His manager Auguste announced: “Everybody come downstairs.”

One by one all six co-workers filed down to the basement with Auguste for what Mr. Johnson presumed would be a brief meeting. 

“I was the first one to notice that them things weren’t right,” Mr. Johnson said. 

The tenor quickly turned to a stickup. 

Mr. Johnson managed to take off his precious gold chain that his father gifted him and stow it in his pocket.

“So when I noticed that it was getting rough, I’m trying to take my stuff off and put it away so I wouldn’t get robbed,” he said. 

Armed with a pistol, Taylor barked orders, Mr. Johnson said. 

The mastermind shouted: “Everybody back up! Lay down on the floor!” — while Godineaux “duct-taped everybody up.”

The staff’s hands and mouths were sealed shut with tape. But Auguste, the manager, was experiencing an asthmatic episode. 

“The manager — he popped the tape off,” Mr. Johnson recounted. “He’s like, ‘I can’t breathe!’ And they picked him up. Put more duct tape on him and put him in the freezer.”

The rest of the captives would soon be ushered into the walk-in refrigerator and freezer unit. 

Once inside, Mr. Johnson said Taylor and Godineaux “put the plastic bags over everybody’s heads.”

They were ordered to get on their knees. Then the talk was over. 

Mr. Johnson remembered the eerie silence: “They didn’t have anything to say.” 

And without any hesitation, Taylor started blasting each Wendy’s worker, one by one. 

He counted the bullets: “Shot-shot-shot-shot-shot-shot–!”

Mr. Johnson said Taylor shot Auguste then 22-year-old Anita Smith. 

Taylor then handed the gun, later determined to be a Bryco .380-caliber semiautomatic pistol (purchased at an Ohio gun shop), to Mr. Godineaux to finish off the rest.   

Then, Mr. Johnson said, Godineaux put down Ramon Nazario, 44, Ali Ibadat, 40, Patrick Castro, Jeremy Mele, 18, “and then me.”  

“I was the last one to get it,” he recalled. 

The seconds just before Mr. Johnson was to be slain, the man of Pentecostal faith said he eeked out a silent prayer to himself. 

“I said, ‘Lord save me!’”

Recovering in the Hospital With ’50 Cent‘

As Mr. Johnson was battling to live after being admitted to Jamaica Hospital, he found himself alongside hip-hop star Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson, who had been shot nine times on the same day.  

“He was in the same hospital I was in,” Mr. Johnson mused. 

Weeks passed and Mr. Johnson’s prognosis wasn’t sunny. 

“They told me that there’s a good chance that I won’t make it to see 30,” he said. 

“They told me what I had but they gave me these medical terms and I don’t really understand that,” he said. That supposed pessimism among white coats who oversaw his recovery didn’t phase Mr. Johnson. “I’m 43,” he boasted. “You do the math.”

There’s still a gap where his tooth once was, next to his canine on the right side of his mouth, and a scar that he said stretches “from ear to ear.” 

But gone are the seizures and the splitting headaches. 

Each day is a blessing for Mr. Johnson, who is now raising several children running from infant to 19 years old.  

Mr. Johnson stopped popping the meds that he was prescribed and despite being told he shouldn’t run, climb ladders, swim, or exercise, he jogs regularly and labors as a plumber, pipefitter, and in other heavy-duty gigs. 

He says that he remains confident that he’ll stick around for as long as God wants. 

“What can I say? It wasn’t my time to go,” Mr. Johnson said. “It wasn’t Patrick’s time to go. I guess it was the other people’s time to go. Know what I mean, that’s all I had to say about that. You know, I miss them. I love them.”

“I’ve left it in God’s hands and that’s that,” he said. “I want to go there and see them face-to-face!”

Despite their attempt to kill any witnesses, the killers were caught two days after the murders, based on an anonymous tip and Taylor’s prior record of robbing fast food restaurants. Godineaux was hauled away from a clothing store where he worked as a security guard, and Taylor was seized outside a relative’s Long Island home.   

Cops found a page of scrawled rap lyrics crinkled at the bottom of Taylor’s bag. 

They read: “I had to sell some crack, weed and even kill my boss now I’m the king with the crown if anybody f— with me I’ll huff, puff pull out the guns and slow our chump ass down so now you know how I go.”  

Godineaux, who was reportedly mentally slow, pleaded guilty for his hand in killing five Wendy’s workers. Taylor took his case to trial. 

For three weeks, prosecutors hammered home evidence and portrayed Taylor as being on a Wendy’s warpath after he was booted from his manager’s perch at the Flushing restaurant and, based on a poor review, was eventually fired from another Wendy’s. The younger boss he blamed for his misfortunes? Jean Auguste.

The trial was also the first time Mr. Johnson spoke about the case to police. 

“That’s the only time I talked around a cop was when I went to court,” he recalled. 

On November 19, 2002, a jury of eight men and four women decided that Taylor should be sentenced to death;  a sentence that nearly five years later was vacated by the state court of Appeals.

Taylor, who at one point was the only inmate serving on New York State’s death row,  was then resentenced to life without parole. (New York State no longer has the death penalty, and no one has been executed in New York since 1963.)  

Among New York City’s bloodbaths, the Wendy’s Massacre stands at third most deadly. 

Back on April 15, 1984, in what became known as the Palm Sunday Massacre, 10 women and children were shot dead in East New York by a drug-addled madman who believed his estranged wife was having an affair.

On Valentine’s Day in 1993, seven people were slaughtered in the Bronx over a simmering love triangle involving two young women clamoring over a man. 

That deadly day would be known as the “Valentine’s Day Massacre.” 

The Wendy’s Massacre was so ghastly a crime that the then-Queens district attorney, Richard A. Brown, unraveled, calling the aftermath “the most horrendous crime scene I’ve ever witnessed” in his tenure of nearly a decade. 

Three years ago, the shopping center that had taken over the location where the Wendy’s once stood suffered a five-alarm fire. Mr. Johnson says good riddance. 

“I think it was like bad spirits or something around that area or something like that,” he said. 

The bad juju aside, Mr. Johnson was planning to take in the anniversary with a nice breakfast, a morning jog, and then possibly a visit to the Queens Botanical Gardens to honor the victims. It was there, months after the slaughter, that the Wendy’s founder, Dave Thomas, now deceased, along with Mayor Giuliani watered a young flowering cherry tree honoring those taken too soon.  

Mr. Johnson doesn’t expect to ever get an apology from either Taylor or Godineaux. And though he is religious, he is finding it hard to forgive his would-be executioners. That has him hoping for a reunion, at least one where the killers don’t have their heads cast downward, like they were in the courtroom. 

“I want to go visit them [in prison] and see what they say,” he explained. 

He has a particular question to ask, too.

“I want to go there and see them face-to-face and ask them: ‘How does it feel to see the person that you killed?’ And then once they answer, I’ll walk out.”