SEATTLE — The man had been banned from the artsy cafe for acting out, but that didn’t stop him from walking in, taking a seat at the bar and trying to place an order. After the barista declined to serve him, he stood up, took out a gun and shot the man next to him.

Then he worked his way up the bar, calmly taking life after life from the people seated there or scrambling for cover. One man tried to stop him.

Grabbing the only weapons at hand — bar stools — he tossed them at the gunman, even as the man aimed at him, Seattle Assistant Police Chief Jim Pugel said Thursday after reviewing harrowing surveillance video of the massacre. The tactic created enough of a delay in the shooting that two or three other customers were able to bolt out the door to safety.

“My brother died in the World Trade Center,” the man later told Seattle police, who did not release his name but provided an account of the interview. After his brother’s death, he said, he resolved that if something like this ever happened, “I would never hide under a table.”

The Seattle Times late Thursday identified the man as Lawrence Adams, 56.

Adams told the newspaper that his brother, Stephen Adams, an employee at the Windows on the World restaurant, had been killed in the World Trade Center attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

He declined to give a detailed account of the shootings.

By the time Ian Lee Stawicki’s rampage was over, five people had been shot in Cafe Racer — four fatally, including two musicians who frequently played there.

The gunman put his two .45-caliber handguns in his pocket, then bent down, picked a bowler-style hat off the head of one of his dead victims, placed it on his own head and walked out.

He fled first to downtown Seattle, where he shot a woman to death while stealing her black Mercedes sport utility vehicle, then drove it to West Seattle, where he met up with an old friend who had no idea what he’d done, police said.

The friend eventually ditched Stawicki because he wasn’t making any sense, and called police after learning about the shootings. Stawicki killed himself on a West Seattle street as officers moved in to arrest him.

“In my almost 30 years in this department, I’ve never seen anything more callous, horrific and cold,” Deputy Police Chief Nick Metz said Thursday after reviewing video footage of the cafe killings.

Police late Thursday released 911 tapes from the shooting spree, including one from a man who phoned authorities from inside a bathroom at the cafe.

“Somebody came in and shot a bunch of people. I’m hiding in the bathroom. We need help right away,” the man says, adding he didn’t see the gunman. “I can see people laying on the floor.