NEW BEDFORD, Mass. (AP) – As a manhunt continued Friday for the young man accused of attacking three patrons of a gay nightspot with a hatchet and handgun, one of his victims returned to the bar Friday evening after being discharged from a Boston hospital.

Robert Perry appeared on television with a black right eye, a five-inch cut on his right cheek, and a bullet hole in the center of his back just to the right of his spine where he said the bullet passed under his skin.

He said his assailant hit him in the face with a hatchet first, then shot him. “I heard a gunshot, I felt the sensation in my back, I smelled the gunpowder, and I’m like, I think I’ve been hit,” he said in television interviews.

Perry, a paramedic from Dartmouth, said he thought the attack was fatal. “What was going through my mind is that I was going to die soon. This is the end. I knew I was going to die.”

He said he lay still until the attacker left Puzzles Lounge. “I was afraid he would come back and hit me again and finish me off,” he told WCVB-TV.

“My whole life I’ve dealt with issues of tolerance and I’ve struggled with this. I just wish people would understand that we’re not bad people,” he told the station.

Friends said Jacob Robida, the 18-year-old sought in the attacks that left three men wounded, one critically, sometimes glorified Naziism but never expressed any specific prejudice toward gays.

Police have labeled the incident a hate crime and said Robida would be charged with attempted murder, assault and civil rights violations. But he remained at large Friday night.

“Right now everything is on the board,” said police spokesman Capt. Richard Spirlet. “We are looking at everything.”

Investigators released a 911 tape from the incident on Friday. Several loud pops that police said may be gunshots can be heard over the chaotic shouts of bar patrons and the voice of an unidentified woman who called in the emergency.

The other two victims were Alex Taylor of Fairhaven and Luis Rosado of New Bedford. Taylor was at Massachusetts General Hospital. It wasn’t clear which hospital was treating Rosado, and neither of their conditions was disclosed Friday, though police said a day earlier that one of the victims was in critical condition.

Heather Volton, 22, of Fall River, said she’s been friends with Robida for more than a year after meeting him through mutual friends. He had a swastika tattooed on his hand, she said, but Volton was surprised that his prejudice allegedly boiled over into violence.

“The kid never so much as raised his voice at me,” she said.

Another friend, Jennifer Crosby, 24, also of Fall River, identified herself as “part black and a lesbian,” and said Robida never expressed any hostility toward gays.

“I have no idea why he did this,” said Crosby, who occasionally visits Puzzles. She said she wishes she were there when he walked in early Thursday to prevent him from attacking patrons.

“He knows me,” she said. “I don’t think he would have done anything.”

A man who answered the door at Robida’s mother’s house Friday morning ordered reporters off the property.

Police officers went to the home on Thursday and spoke to his mother, Stephanie Oliver. According to a police affidavit, she said Robida came home around 1 a.m., bleeding from the head, then left again. In his bedroom, the officers found what they described as “Nazi regalia” and anti-Semitic writings on the wall, according to police.

Robida was last seen driving a green 1999 Pontiac Grand Am, and Spirlet said police had not recovered the car and were asking the public to be on the lookout, especially in alleys and other places it could have been hidden.

“It has to be somewhere,” he said.

Robida and his friends share a love of Insane Clown Posse, a Detroit-based rap group known for explicit lyrics and wearing sinister clown makeup.

Police said they were examining material he posted on his Web site, hosted by MySpace.com, an Internet forum where users create personal home pages and chat online. The Web site, which has photos of Robida, is full of references to the band and its label, Psychopathic Records, which has a logo depicting the silhouette of a man wielding a hatchet.

A spokeswoman for MySpace.com said she could not comment on a member’s Web site.

Several online chat mates posted messages Friday, some excoriating and others praising Robida for what he allegedly did.

“I just saw you on the news,” reads one posting. “I couldn’t believe it … why did you do it?”

Volton is afraid people will blame the music for Robida’s alleged attack on the gay bar.

“I don’t blame anything on music,” she said. “People are going to do whatever they’re going to do without music.”

U.S. Rep. Barney Frank, whose district includes New Bedford, said the city has a history of tolerance toward gays.

He pointed out that the city re-elected former Rep. Gerry Studds after he became the first member of Congress to publicly announce he was gay in 1984; and it has repeatedly sent Frank, probably the nation’s most prominent gay politician, to Washington.

“This is not some general problem with the people of New Bedford,” Frank said. “This is one disturbed 18-year-old.”

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Associated Press writers Andrew Ryan and Brandie M. Jefferson contributed to this report.

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