Teresa Wiederin was working at the J.C. Penney store in the Westroads Mall in Omaha on Wednesday when she caught something out of the corner of her eye that didn’t look quite right.

“He went past the window of the mall,” she told TODAY co-host Matt Lauer on Thursday. “He just ran past the window. He caught my eye because of the motion. The only thing I really saw were his pants and this huge gun which was pointing down. He wasn’t shooting anybody.”

She had seen Robert Hawkins, a 19-year-old high-school dropout who had lost his home, his job flipping burgers and his girlfriend and was on his way to check out of life and take as many people as he could with him.

A short distance from the store where Wiederin worked, Hawkins strolled into the Van Maur department store, took an elevator to the mall’s third floor, and opened fire with an assault.

When the bullets stopped flying, nine people were dead, including the gunman.

Video   Teen gunman wanted to die 'famous' Dec. 6: A teenager who wanted to die "famous" kills eight at an Omaha shopping mall before killing himself. TODAY's Natalie Morales reports. Today show

“When I first realized something was wrong was when I saw a woman with a stroller and ... a little boy about 3 or 4 trying to keep up with her,” Wiederin said. “She had this awful look on her face.”

The woman rushed into the Penney’s store, she said, shouting, “He’s got a gun. He’s shooting people. He’s going to kill us!”

Wiederin, a mother of six ranging in age from 19 to 6, immediately called store security on a radio, telling them to lock down the building.

She herded those in the store to a back storage room to get them away from the shooting. And she called her husband, leaving him a message to let him know she wouldn’t be able to take one of their children to a doctor’s appointment and pick up their two youngest at school.

“I was at work away from my phone and they paged me,” Mark Wiederin, Teresa’s husband, told Lauer. “They said, ‘There’s been an emergency at your wife’s work.’ I thought it might be a medical issue. Then my son called and said, ‘There’s been a shooting and Mom’s okay.’ “

Unable to call his wife, Wiederin made arrangements for care of the kids and sent her a text message to let her know everything was set.

“I told her to stay safe and pray,” he said.

Taking cover
Elsewhere in the mall, Jeff Schaffart was shopping with his wife for a Christmas dress for his 2-year-old daughter when he heard popping sounds.

“I thought it was balloons or construction,” he told Lauer from Omaha.

When his wife yelled at him to get down, he saw blood on his hand and arm, then felt stinging and realized he’d been shot.

“I was shot from behind,” he said, adding that he was in an atrium area, about 40-50 feet away from where Hawkins had taken up his position.

Video   Mall gunshot victim recalls ordeal Dec. 6: Gunshot victim Jeff Schaffart talks with TODAY's Matt Lauer about the shooting rampage at a mall in Omaha, Neb. Today show

One bullet had passed through Schaffart’s upper arm. Another grazed his little finger. He and his wife took refuge in a women’s bathroom with about 10 women, where he fashioned a tourniquet out of his necktie to stop the bleeding.

“It was a tense situation but nobody was panicking,” Schaffart said. “Where we were at, you couldn’t hear the gunshots. You couldn’t hear anything there, so there wasn’t a lot of panicking where I was at.”

After Hawkins had finished his bloody work and taken his own life, police clearing the mall led the Schaffarts and the others who had been in the bathroom out.

They took us through the third floor there, and you saw some pretty bad stuff,” Schaffart said.

Shooting reconstruction
The mall was still swarming with police on Thursday morning as police continued to reconstruct the worst mass murder in Nebraska history.

“We will be reconstructing the crime scene,” Omaha Police Chief Thomas Warren told TODAY’s Natalie Morales outside the mall on Thursday morning. “We will be trying to determine his activities throughout the day. We will be releasing the names of the victims. We have notified the next of kin.”

Police and other emergency services were on the scene in force within minutes to the first 911 calls, Warren noted. But S.W.A.T. teams trained to isolate a shooter and save lives had no time to act.

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