WEDNESDAY UPDATE FROM DENVERPOST.COM
Aurora Police have released the names of the victims and suspects involved in the Aurora Mall shooting. The woman who died was identified as Krystal D. Martinez, 19. Her companion, who was involved in the dispute with the two suspects, is Kyle Douglas Boyd, 23. The third victim, believed to be an innocent bystander, is Susan E. Holyfield, 48. Boyd and Holyfield were both injured in the shooting. Boyd is still hospitalized.
The suspects are Christopher Joseph Taylor of Denver, and Gregory Keith Holiday of Boulder. Both are 20 years old and in police custody.
Aurora – A young woman who tried to prevent a violent altercation in Aurora Mall was shot to death in a hail of gunfire as horrified shoppers looked on, police and witnesses said Tuesday evening.
The woman’s male companion and an older woman, a bystander, also were shot and were taken to a hospital, said Aurora police Sgt. Rudy Hererra.
Police don’t believe the incident is related to a double killing the night before at East Idaho Place and South Dayton Street.
Two young men, both possibly juveniles, were singled out by witnesses and run down by police. They were in custody Tuesday night, Hererra said.
One bare-chested man, holding his bloody shirt, told how he held the woman in his arms as she died.
Corey Rice, 27, visiting from Kansas City, Mo., said he heard at least seven gunshots and glass shattering. He saw a girl get shot and fall at the bottom of a stairway.
Rice said he ran to see if she was all right. He parted her hair to see where she was shot. The wound was in her right temple.
“She looked up at me, closed her eyes, and she put her head down,” Rice said.
When he looked up, he saw the “heels” of one of the assailants as he ran away, he said.
Hererra said the young woman was pronounced dead at the scene. The conditions of the two wounded people were not known.
Witnesses said that the male companion suffered a graze wound to his head and that a woman, described as in her late 50s or early 60s, was grazed by a bullet on an arm.
Hererra said police received “numerous” 911 telephone calls about 7:30 p.m. about shots fired in the mall, at 14200 E. Alameda Ave.
An off-duty Aurora police officer working security at the mall ran to the sound of the gunshots on the lower level of the north end of the mall, and several Aurora officers responded, surrounding the large shopping center.
The young couple had just exited a store on the lower level of the mall near the base of a stairway, and the man got into an argument with two or more males, Hererra said.
The young woman tried to pull her companion back, and then shots rang out, Hererra said.
Witnesses pointed the suspects out to police, and they were chased through the J.C. Penney store and caught outside, he said.
Ikey Jackson, 25, a friend of Rice’s from Philadelphia, said the shooter, at the top of the stairs, was yelling at the male victim at the bottom of the stairs, “Let’s take it outside.”
The girl was trying to stop the guy she was with from going outside, he said.
Shae Lantz, 27, of Aurora, heard the two men yelling at each other.
“I thought there was going to be a fight,” Lantz said. “I heard, ‘Let’s take it outside. (Expletive) you. Who do you think you are? Let’s take it outside.”‘
The young woman was saying, “No. No. Let’s not do this,” he said.
Lantz said, “She sounded like she knew this was a bad idea. I don’t know if her instincts were going up, but she knew it was serious.”
There were so many shots, Lantz thought two people were firing at the same time. It sounded like small-caliber gunshots, like a .22 caliber, he said.
“I thought it was like a firecracker,” he said.
Walter Tabarez, 16, who has worked at the mall for three days, at first thought the shots were from a nail gun construction workers in the mall use.
He saw the commotion made by paramedics as they tried to save the young woman. He saw someone with a gun on the run. The fleeing youth was wearing a red polo shirt and baggy jeans. He was holding his pants up as he ran.
“I didn’t think something like that could happen inside the mall with all those security and cops,” Tabarez said.
“People kept on shopping. It’s totally unbelievable that people could keep on doing that,” he said.
Robert Melville, 35, of Aurora, said he saw “people clearing from the halls to get away from the shooting.”
A lot of people ran into the store where he works, Melville said.
“We’re fairly certain that they are responsible for the shooting,” Herrera said of the two taken into custody.
Police recovered two handguns, which were being fingerprinted and tested to see whether they had been fired, he said. The hands of the two youths also were being tested for gunshot residue, he said.
Staff writers Daarel Burnette II and Christopher Ortiz contributed to this report.
