On December 6th a 19 year old boy, Robert A. Hawkins, came into the Westroads Mall in Omaha, Nebraska with an assault rifle hidden under his hooded sweatshirt. He took the elevator to the third floor and when the doors opened started shooting shoppers and employees at random. Hawkins fired more than 30 rounds form an AK-47 assault rifle that police believe he stole from his stepfather’s house. When the police arrived seven minutes later the shooting was over and eight people had been shot and killed and five others were wounded before Hawkins turned the gun on himself. Two of the killed were shoppers and six were employees. All of the victims were killed in the Von Maur department store except for one man who was trying to call 911 at the top of an escalator in an atrium on the second floor when Hawkins shot him in the head form the third floor. Hawkins left a suicide not in which he put down himself and said he would no longer be a burden to anyone and said that he was “going to be famous now.”
President Bush offered his condolences and the federal government’s help. Ironically Bush was in Omaha that day for a fundraiser but left around an hour before the shooting. A woman who had taken Hawkins after he left his parents house said that he had suffered from a series of personal set backs which included losing his job at McDonald’s and his girlfriend. Sources say that he had taken drugs for anti depression in the past had stopped taking them.
On October 31, 1985 in Philadelphia, PA a woman wearing combat fatigues opened fire with a semiautomatic rifle at a suburban mall. The woman killed two people and injured eight others. Police said that about 20 shots were fired in a span of about four minutes. The woman was stopped by a 24 year old college student grabbed the woman and was able to wrestle her to the floor and kick the gun away from her. The two people that died were a 2 year old boy from New Castle, DE, and a 64 year old man.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/12/06/
AR2007120601013_3.html?hpid=topnews
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