OMAHA - Authorities yesterday scoured surveillance recordings and studied text messages, voicemail, and letters that a gunman sent before he stepped from a third-floor elevator in a shopping mall in the city and killed eight people.
With an AK-47 assault rifle concealed in a hooded sweat shirt, police said, Robert A. Hawkins, 19, walked into the Von Maur department store Wednesday afternoon, ducked out, and returned shortly after. His behavior was enough to draw the notice of unarmed security guards at Westroads Mall, Police Chief Thomas Warren said, but by the time officers arrived six minutes later he had killed five women, three men, and himself.
"From the time he entered the store to the time he rode up on the elevator, mall security did not have a chance to intervene," Warren said. "Shortly thereafter was the shooting incident."
The killing rampage cast a pall over this Midwestern city, where holiday music on the radio was interrupted with bulletins from the shooting.
In a news conference yesterday, the police chief read the names of the victims, who ranged in age from a woman who was 14 days from her 25th birthday to a 66-year-old woman.
To get to the sprawling shopping center on the city's western edge, Hawkins drove 20 miles from Bellevue, where he had been living with a family.
The police said Hawkins probably selected Westroads Mall because it was near the home of a friend Hawkins visited shortly before the shootings, one of many farewell messages he delivered Wednesday.
In the aftermath of the shooting, the picture that began to emerge of Hawkins was full of familiar warning signs - a young man faced with seemingly insurmountable depression, alienation, abandonment, rejection - but plenty of pieces that didn't entirely fit together. Several people who knew him described him as an outgoing young man who would offer hugs to cheer others.
Before the shooting, Hawkins told friends he had been fired from his job at
"This was an ugly act of cowardice," Mayor Mike Fahey of Omaha said yesterday.
The police recovered an AK-47-style semiautomatic weapon inside the department store, which authorities said Hawkins had apparently stolen from his stepfather. He carried two magazines with 30 rounds each that "had the capacity to fire multiple rounds in a short period of time," the police chief said.
Dressed in camouflage, Hawkins worked his way through the store, passing an atrium that opened onto the second floor. He startled shoppers at display cases, and moved toward the customer service area, where employees were wrapping gifts. All the time, police said, he was firing his weapon.
As churches across the city held memorial services for victims of the shooting, local, state, and federal authorities tried to piece together details of Hawkins's life that might have led him to commit the crime. The police seized his computer, interviewed friends, and sorted through a juvenile record that began in 2002, when he became a ward of the state after making homicidal threats against his stepmother.
In interviews yesterday, friends of Hawkins said he had made other threats.
Just two weeks ago, one friend said, Hawkins threatened to kill her because he suspected her of stealing a compact disc player from his car. "He told me he was going to kill me and he was going to kill my family and burn my house down," she said.
