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An Aurora woman remembers hearing her daughter yell, “Get down! Get down!” as guns blazed in her driveway late Tuesday.

A Denver man watering his lawn about 2 1/2 miles away ran for cover only minutes later as a “little brown car” rounded the corner, the doors flew open as the occupants bailed out on the dead run, and more shots were fired.

The couple living next door hid in their bathroom.

The gun battle between an Aurora police officer and three men in a stolen car left one man dead, one on the lam and a teenager in custody, Aurora police said Wednesday.

The sleepless residents of the two neighborhoods were still a little groggy Wednesday afternoon, recounting the long night rocked by gunfire and racked with fear, and being trapped for hours in their homes by police tape defining two crime scenes.

Police reported that an officer, whose name wasn’t released, ran a license-plate check on a car near East Colfax Avenue and Kenton Street about 10:40 p.m. He was told the car had been stolen in Lakewood.

The officer followed the car past Kenton Elementary School and St. Therese School, police said. When the car pulled into a driveway at 1181 Kenton St., the officer “issued commands” to the men in the car.

Shots rang out, and the officer returned fire, police said.

The car fled south on Kenton and then west on East 11th Avenue with the officer in close pursuit. The chase continued west into Denver to Verbena Street, where the men in the stolen car turned north and two of them jumped out and ran.

A third man was mortally wounded, and police pulled him out of the driver’s door, said a witness. He was pronounced dead at a local hospital.

The stolen car rolled to a stop on the sidewalk on the east side of Verbena, “just an inch” from Renee Weifenback’s prized clematis.

A 17-year-old leaped from the car and ran across the street into Verbena Park, where he was caught by Aurora officers who were pouring onto the scene, police and witnesses said. He is being held pending charges.

Rayshaun J. Holmes, 24, escaped, and a warrant has been issued for his arrest on a charge of attempted first-degree murder of a peace officer, police said.

The name of the dead man hadn’t been released pending notification of relatives.

“It just kept going. It just kept poppin’,” said Lisa Bluford, Neighborhood Watch captain in the area where the shooting started.

“It just went pop, pop, pop,” she said of the gunfire.

The shooting started in Anna Thomas’ driveway. On Wednesday, she showed off a bullet hole in the front wall of her house. Her daughter had been watching television while lying on a couch on the other side of that wall, she said.

Investigators collected about 20 spent shell casings from the front of her home, five or six from the driveway, she said.

Her next-door neighbor, Ralph Crum, also pointed to a bullet hole in the front of his home.

“I took a sleeping pill, and do you think that worked? No, it didn’t. I was so nervous,” Thomas, 84, said of the aftermath of the shooting.

“I was so glad it wasn’t a cop that got killed,” she said. “I don’t think we could take that after the one in Denver.”

Denver police Detective Donald “Donnie” Young was shot and killed in southwest Denver as a baptismal party was breaking up early May 8.

Keith Pearl, who lives on Verbena Street, pointed out the crease the stolen car left in the side of his wife’s van as it coasted past and came to rest against a neighbor’s chain-link fence.

He ran for safety when he heard shots.

“When I duck for cover, I don’t stick around,” he said.

Weifenback said she and her husband hid in their bathroom when they heard about three shots fired, until they saw “lots of red lights.” She had been watching “Dead Zone” on television, and he was in bed.

They overheard police say they found three guns in the car, including a TEC-9 in the dead man’s lap.

The officer involved has been placed on administrative leave with pay pending the investigation of the shooting, police said.

Staff writer Jim Kirksey can be reached at 303-820-1448 or jkirksey@denverpost.com.