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Chilling account of US shooting
07/12/2007 14:02 - (SA)
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| Flowers sit outside the entrance to the Von Maur store at Westroads Mall in Omaha. (Dave Weaver, AP) |
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Omaha, Nebraska - The release of a taped emergency call from an employee at the Nebraska mall where a gunman killed eight people and himself offered a chilling, new account of the rampage.
Jodi Longmeyer saw the gunman step off the mall elevator on the third floor, according to the recording. He was dressed in dark clothes. She saw his gun and watched him open fire. Then she hit the floor.
Robert A Hawkins' rampage was over in six minutes. But Longmeyer agonised with an emergency operator for almost a half hour while barricading herself in an employee locker room at the Von Maur store.
"I just saw someone up here in the locker room and she's got a lot of blood on the floor," Longmeyer told the emergency dispatcher in tapes released on Thursday.
Minutes later, shaking and scared, Longmeyer, who is a human resources manager at Von Maur, locked herself into a security room where she watched live surveillance of the department store.
"Oh my gosh," she told the dispatcher. "It looks like the gun is lying over by customer service. It looks like he might have killed himself," Longmeyer said as she started to cry.
Longmeyer's account, one of more than a dozen emergency calls placed during Wednesday's shooting, offered new details about what happened inside the upscale shopping mall on Omaha's west side.
New details also surfaced on Thursday about the young gunman.
'Someone should have listened to him'
State officials said Hawkins spent four years in a series of treatment centres, group homes and foster care after threatening to kill his stepmother in 2002.
Finally, in August 2006, social workers, the courts and his father all agreed: It was time for Hawkins to be released - nine months before he turned 19 and would have been required to leave anyway.
The group homes and treatment centres were for youths with substance abuse, mental or behavioural problems. Altogether, the state spent about $265 000 on Hawkins, officials said.
The aftermath of Wednesday's killings, left some who knew Hawkins questioning if more should have been done.
"He should have gotten help, but I think he needed someone to help him and needed someone to be there when in the past he's said he wanted to kill himself," said Karissa Fox, who said she knew Hawkins through a friend. "Someone should have listened to him."
Todd Landry, state director of children and family services, said court records do not show precisely why Hawkins was released. But he said if Hawkins should not have been set free, an official would have raised a red flag.
"It was not a failure of the system to provide appropriate services," Landry said. "If that was an issue, any of the participants in the case would have brought that forward."
After reviewing surveillance tape, a suicide note and Hawkins' last conversations with those close to him, police said they do not know - and may never know - exactly why Hawkins went to the Von Maur store at Westroads Mall and opened fire.
But he clearly planned ahead, walking through the store, exiting, then returning a few minutes later with a gun concealed in a balled-up sweat shirt he was carrying, authorities said.
Police said they have found no connections between the 19-year-old and the six employees and two shoppers he killed. "The shooting victims were randomly selected," as was the location of the shooting, Omaha Police Chief Thomas Warren said.
Acquaintances said that Hawkins was a drug user and that he had a history of depression. In 2005 and 2006, according to court records, he underwent psychiatric evaluations, the reasons for which Landry would not disclose, citing privacy rules.
About an hour before the shootings, Hawkins called Debora Maruca-Kovac, a woman who with her husband took Hawkins into their home because he had no other place to live. He told her he had written a suicide note, Maruca-Kovac said. In the note, Hawkins wrote that he was "sorry for everything" and would not be a burden on his family anymore.
The victims, five women and three men, ranged in age from 24 to 66.
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