Nebraska Mall Shooter Broke Up With Girlfriend, Lost Job Before Massacre (2 Stories)

[leobold1]

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Thursday, December 06, 2007

OMAHA, Neb. — A teenage gunman carried his AK-47 into a Nebraska department store, took the elevator up to the third floor and immediately opened gunfire on innocent customers and store employees, officials said Thursday.

The victims, ranging from ages 24 to 66, sought cover in dressing rooms and clothing racks at the Westroads Mall but lost their lives at the hands of a 19-year-old gunman.

The incident left eight dead and five wounded before the shooter, Robert A. Hawkins, killed himself with a self-inflicted gunshot, Omaha Police Chief Thomas Warren said.

Hele Spivack, a customer, ran into a dressing room to seek refuge from the shooter.

“I turned my cell phone onto vibrate because I didn’t want to draw any attention to myself,” Spivack told FOX News.

Spivack heard the shots getting closer and then it was quiet. Police soon rescued her and she saw the shooter lying in a pool of blood.

The shooter left behind a suicide note that read, in part, "sorry for everything," and "Now I'll be famous." Hawkins recently broke up with his girlfriend and lost his job at McDonald's. He also had a criminal record.

"These were innocent people going about their daily lives, performing their jobs and shopping for the holidays," Omaha Mayor Mike Fahey said at a Thursday press conference, describing the gunman as a "deeply disturbed individual." "They were men and women who did not deserve the fate they were given."

The victims appeared to be selected at random, Warren said. Five females and four males were killed, including the gunman. Six of the victims were store employees.

A surveillance tape may provide more clues in the ongoing investigation to reconstruct the incident, Warren said. Hawkins used an AK-47 that he stole from his stepfather, Warren added.

Nebraska Gov. Dave Heineman ordered flags flown at half-staff through Sunday in honor of the victims and their families.

The customers killed were Gary Scharf, 48 of Lincoln and John McDonald, 65, of Council Bluffs, Iowa. The employees killed were Angie Schuster, 36, of Omaha; Maggie Webb, 24; Janet Jorgensen, 66 of Omaha; Diane Trent, 53 of Omaha; Gary Joy, 56 of Omaha; and Beverly Flynn, 47, of Omaha, police said.

Nebraska Medical Center spokeswoman Andrea McMaster said the hospital had three victims from the mall shooting, including Fred Wilson, 61, who was in critical condition early Thursday with a bullet wound to his chest.

Micky Oldham, 65, was in stable condition at Creighton University Medical Center. Oldham, who was shot once in the abdomen and once in the back, underwent surgery Wednesday to repair injuries, Dr. Leon Sykes said.

Meanwhile, investigators reviewing Hawkins' past discovered that he left his family's home about a year ago and moved in with a friend's family. Debora Maraca-Kovac and her husband welcomed Hawkins into their home.

"When he first came in the house, he was introverted, a troubled young man who was like a lost pound puppy that nobody wanted," Maruca-Kovac told The Associated Press.

She told the Omaha World-Herald that the night before the shooting, Hawkins and her sons showed her an SKS semiautomatic Russian military rifle — the same type used in the shooting. She said she thought the gun belonged to a member of Hawkins' family. She said she didn't think much of it — the gun looked too old to work.

Records in Sarpy and Washington counties showed Hawkins had a felony drug conviction and several misdemeanor cases filed against him, including an arrest 11 days before the shooting for having alcohol as a minor. He was due in court in two weeks.

Maruca-Kovac said Hawkins had recently broken up with a girlfriend and was fired from McDonald's. She told the World-Herald that Hawkins said he had been fired after being accused of stealing $17 from his till at the restaurant. McDonald's management declined to comment to the newspaper.

Maruca-Kovac said he phoned her at about 1 p.m. Wednesday, telling her he had left a note. She tried to get him to explain.

"He said, 'It's too late,"' and hung up, she told CNN. She then called Hawkins' mother.

Maruca-Kovac went to her job as a nurse at the Nebraska Medical Center, where victims of the shooting soon began to arrive.

The first 911 call came in at 1:42 p.m., and the shooting was already over when police arrived six minutes later, authorities said.

"We sent every available officer in the city of Omaha," Sgt. Teresa Negron said. "They came to the mall in lights and sirens."

The World-Herald reported that the gunman had a military-style haircut and a black backpack, and wore a camouflage vest.

Hawkins opened fire in a Von Maur store, part of a Midwestern chain. The mall will remain closed on Thursday while authorities conduct their investigation.

Mickey Vickory, who worked in the store's third-floor service department, said she heard shots and went with coworkers and customers into a back closet, emerging about a half-hour later when police shouted to come out with their hands up. As police led them to another part of the mall for safety, they saw the victims.

"We saw the bodies and we saw the blood," she said.

Keith Fidler, another Von Maur employee, said he heard a burst of five to six shots followed by 15 to 20 more rounds. Fidler said he huddled in the corner of the men's clothing department with about a dozen other employees until police yelled to get out of the store.

Witness Shawn Vidlak said the shots sounded like a nail gun. At first he thought it was noise from construction work at the mall.

"People started screaming about gunshots," Vidlak said. "I grabbed my wife and kids. We got out of there as fast as we could."

On Wednesday night, police used a bomb robot to access a Jeep Cherokee left in the mall parking lot that authorities believe belonged to Hawkins. Officers had seen some wires under some clothing, but no bomb was found.

The sprawling, three-level mall has more than 135 stores and restaurants. It gets 14.5 million visitors every year, according to its Web site.

It was the second mass shooting at a mall this year. In February, nine people were shot, five of them fatally, at Trolley Square mall in Salt Lake City. The gunman, 18-year-old Sulejman Talovic, was shot and killed by an off-duty police officer.

The shooting spree was Nebraska's deadliest since January 1958, when Charles Starkweather killed 10 people in Nebraska and another in Wyoming.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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Media Coverage of Mall Shooting Fails to Reveal Mall's Gun-Free-Zone Status

Thursday, December 06, 2007

By John R. Lott, Jr.

The horrible tragedy at the Westroads Mall in Omaha, Neb. received a lot of attention Wednesday and Thursday. It should have. Eight people were killed, and five were wounded.

A Google news search using the phrase "Omaha Mall Shooting" finds an incredible 2,794 news stories worldwide for the last day. From India and Taiwan to Britain and Austria, there are probably few people in the world who haven’t heard about this tragedy.

But despite the massive news coverage, none of the media coverage, at least by 10 a.m. Thursday, mentioned this central fact: Yet another attack occurred in a gun-free zone.

Surely, with all the reporters who appear at these crime scenes and seemingly interview virtually everyone there, why didn’t one simply mention the signs that ban guns from the premises?

Nebraska allows people to carry permitted concealed handguns, but it allows property owners, such as the Westroads Mall, to post signs banning permit holders from legally carrying guns on their property.

The same was true for the attack at the Trolley Square Mall in Utah in February (a copy of the sign at the mall can be seen here). But again the media coverage ignored this fact. Possibly the ban there was even more noteworthy because the off-duty police officer who stopped the attack fortunately violated the ban by taking his gun in with him when he went shopping.

Yet even then, the officer "was at the opposite end and on a different floor of the convoluted Trolley Square complex when the shooting began. By the time he became aware of the shooting and managed to track down and confront Talovic [the killer], three minutes had elapsed."

There are plenty of cases every year where permit holders stop what would have been multiple victim shootings every year, but they rarely receive any news coverage. Take a case this year in Memphis, where WBIR-TV reported a gunman started "firing a pistol beside a busy city street" and was stopped by two permit holders before anyone was harmed.

When will part of the media coverage on these multiple-victim public shootings be whether guns were banned where the attack occurred? While the media has begun to cover whether teachers can have guns at school or the almost 8,000 college students across the country who protested gun-free zones on their campuses, the media haven’t started checking what are the rules where these attacks occur.

Surely, the news stories carry detailed information on the weapon used (in this case, a rifle) and the number of ammunition clips (apparently, two). But if these aspects of the story are deemed important for understanding what happened, why isn’t it also important that the attack occurred where guns were banned? Isn’t it important to know why all the victims were disarmed?

Few know that Dylan Klebold, one of the two Columbine killers, closely was following Colorado legislation that would have allowed citizens to carry a concealed handgun. Klebold strongly opposed the legislation and openly talked about it.

No wonder, as the bill being debated would have allowed permitted guns to be carried on school property. It is quite a coincidence that he attacked the Columbine High School the very day the legislature was scheduled to vote on the bill.

Despite the lack of news coverage, people are beginning to notice what research has shown for years: Multiple-victim public shootings keep occurring in places where guns already are banned. Forty states have broad right-to-carry laws, but even within these states it is the "gun-free zones," not other public places, where the attacks happen.

People know the list: Virginia Tech saw 32 murdered earlier this year; the Columbine High School shooting left 13 murdered in 1999; Luby's Cafeteria in Killeen, Texas, had 23 who were fatally shot by a deranged man in 1991; and a McDonald's in Southern California had 21 people shot dead by an unemployed security guard in 1984.

All these attacks — indeed, all attacks involving more than a small number of people being killed — happened in gun-free zones.

In recent years, similar attacks have occurred across the world, including in Australia, France, Germany and Britain. Do all these countries lack enough gun-control laws? Hardly. The reverse is more accurate.

The law-abiding, not criminals, are obeying the rules. Disarming the victims simply means that the killers have less to fear. As Wednesday's attack demonstrated yet again, police are important, but they almost always arrive at the crime scene after the crime has occurred.

The longer it takes for someone to arrive on the scene with a gun, the more people who will be harmed by such an attack.

Most people understand that guns deter criminals. If a killer were stalking your family, would you feel safer putting a sign out front announcing, "This Home Is a Gun-Free Zone"? But that is what the Westroads Mall did.

John Lott is the author of Freedomnomics, upon which this piece draws, and a senior research scholar at the University of Maryland.

[Woodmonkey]

It certainly didn't do the Mall any good being gun free and, if someone had been carrying and could have stopped him, all those people might not have been injured and killed.

If these people are so miserable, they need to just kill themselves and leave innocent people out of it. They must have a strong sense of egotism to want to take all those innocents with them. They are no better than the suicide bombers. The only difference is they take their innocent victims out one by one instead of with a bomb.