Tacoma, Wash. – At first it sounded as if a kiosk had fallen in the Tacoma Mall, but then people started screaming and Stacy Wilson saw the gunman.
“He was walking backward and shooting. I couldn’t see his face,” Wilson, 29, said Sunday afternoon. “Everyone was running and screaming.”
Dominick Maldonado, 20, of Tacoma was booked into Pierce County Jail on six counts of assault and three counts of kidnapping, according to jail records reported by the Seattle Times and Tacoma News Tribune. He was being held on $450,000 bail.
Court records show he has an extensive juvenile criminal history dating back to 1998. He has been convicted of burglary, theft and possession of burglary tools and he had been ordered not to possess any weapons, the Times reported.
The suspect came out of the Sam Goody music store without a gun and surrendered to the SWAT team, Tacoma police spokesman Mark Fulghum said. He said police were interviewing the victims and the three hostages – two men and a woman – to determine what happened during the nearly four hours he was inside.
Wilson ran with a group of women into a Victoria’s Secret store and crouched behind a wall.
She said she heard 15, maybe 20 shots. Then the shooting subsided, and a store employee ran to shut a security gate.
Six people were wounded, one critically, and the gunman ducked into the music store, where he took three people hostage Sunday afternoon, police said.
Susan Serveau said she called her daughter, Kathy Riggans, 24, a manager at Sam Goody, as soon as she heard about the shooting. “She was upset and scared. She was crying,” Serveau said. “All she would say was that she was OK.”
Authorities said they began getting calls about 12:15 p.m. that shots had been fired in the sprawling shopping mall. The first caller said there was a gunman: “He was in the mall, walking along, firing,” Fulghum said.
A man told KING-TV the gunman was smiling as he fired an assault rifle in bursts of four to five shots.
The man said he told his daughter and grandson to run and then hid in the back of a store with his wife and granddaughter.
He says they helped a woman who was shot in the leg, bandaging the wound and wrapping her in blankets.
