A man dressed in camouflage and armed with a rifle opened fire among holiday shoppers in an Omaha department store Wednesday, killing eight people, wounding at least five others and sending hundreds into terrified panic.
The 19-year-old shooter — who reportedly left a note that said “now I’ll be famous” — then shot himself. His body was found on the third floor of the Von Maur department store at West roads Mall. He left a suicide note with a woman in whose home he had stayed.
Witnesses described the carefree sounds of holiday music suddenly punctuated by rapid gunfire shortly before 2 p.m. They related horrific scenes: multiple people gunned down in the store’s customer-service department, others on a floor below shot as they were looking up an escalator toward the chaos.
“The shots wouldn’t stop,” said Von Maur shopper Carol Padon.
The gunman was identified as Robert A. Hawkins of suburban Bellevue. Witnesses at the mall described him as having a military-style haircut, wearing a camouflage vest and a black backpack, and carrying a rifle.
Authorities gave no motive for the attack, but a woman who knew Hawkins said he had recently been fired from his job and had a relationship go sour.
Hawkins’ family had kicked him out, and Hawkins lived for a little more than a year with a friend’s family in a middle-class neighborhood in Bellevue, said Debora Maruca-Kovac, who owns the 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 said.
She said Hawkins was fired from his job at a nearby McDonald’s this week and had recently broken up with a girlfriend.
She said he phoned her about 1 p.m. Wednesday, telling her that he had left a note for her in his bedroom. She tried to get him to explain, but he hung up, she said.
She retrieved the suicide note — in which Hawkins wrote that he was “sorry for everything,” would not be a burden on his family anymore and “now I’ll be famous,” she said — and took it to authorities.
Maruca-Kovac said she then went to her job as a nurse at the Nebraska Medical Center.
Hours later, she said, she saw victims being brought in.
She said Hawkins obtained the gun Tuesday night from his father’s house, saying he and friends were going target shooting Wednesday.
On Omaha television broadcasts, those who knew Hawkins said he was a troubled youth and had been taking medication for emotional problems.
“He was depressed the last couple months, but I never thought he’d do something that extreme,” a friend, Shawn Saunders, told KETV.
A rush to hide
When the shooting started, employees and customers rushed to hide wherever they could, in storerooms and other rooms off the shopping floor.
Renee Toney was working in the gift-wrap area behind the customer-service counter when the gunman exited a third-floor elevator and began firing shots into the ceiling.
“He was moving very fast,” she said. The shots “were very, very fast, I would say closer to 30 (shots) in all.”
A supervisor called for everyone to go into a stockroom behind the customer-service area, and she rushed there, the others just feet behind her.
But she was the only one of her immediate co-workers to make it to the stockroom.
“None of them made it out,” Toney said. “I was up front, and everybody except me was shot. It’s a blur. I don’t even know how I got to the stockroom. I was the closest one to the stockroom. Within seconds, they were shot right behind me.”
A supervisor later told Toney that the man had said, “Open the safe.” One of the employees moved to open the safe, Toney said.
“She never made it to the safe. He shot her before she made it.”
When police later arrived and ushered Toney out, she said she saw blood all over the floor and as many as six bodies, some on top of each other.
Another Von Maur employee described standing on the second floor near the escalator and looking up toward the commotion. She saw a man with a gun lean over a third-floor railing. He then shot a man standing next to her in the head.
Shoppers and employees who were escorted from the mall were instructed to walk out with their hands over their heads. Many of them were hysterical and crying.
Others anxiously waited outside the store. Police and rescue personnel set up a meeting point at a nearby hotel to meet with family members of the victims.
2 of 5 wounded critical
Police said the call of a shooting at the mall came in at 1:42 p.m., and it took six minutes for the first officer to arrive. At 2:12 p.m., officers located the shooter, who was dead from a gunshot wound.
The five wounded people were being treated at Creigh ton University Medical Center and the Nebraska Medical Center. Two were reported to be in critical condition.
President Bush was in Omaha on Wednesday for a fundraiser but left about an hour before the shooting.
“Having just visited with so many members of the community in Omaha today, the president is confident that they will pull together to comfort one another,” White House press secretary Dana Perino said.
Late Wednesday, at a Hampton Inn not far from the mall, more than 30 family members and friends of the victims tensely waited in a conference room to hear about loved ones. Names had not been formally issued to the people, who had waited since early afternoon.
Red Cross workers, chaplains and mental-health counselors joined the group.
“People are obviously very concerned,” said Dena Howard, an official with the Red Cross, “but they haven’t heard anything yet.”
The Associated Press, the Los Angeles Times and The New York Times contributed to this report.
