Mourners light candles for Omaha mall victims

Troubling, puzzling rampage
Hawkins was described by many as having a troubled past. He recently split with his girlfriend and been fired from McDonald’s. He also had a criminal record and had left or been kicked out of his parents’ house.

But the rampage was as troubling as it was puzzling for those who knew him.

“He was depressed, and he had always been depressed. But he looked like he was getting better,” said Debora Maruca-Kovac, a surgical nurse whose family took in Hawkins after her 17- and 19-year-old sons befriended him. “He didn’t cause a lot of trouble. He tried to help out all the time. He was very thankful for everything. He wasn’t a violent person at all.”

The Associated Press’ attempts to reach Hawkins’ biological parents on Thursday were unsuccessful. A man who answered at a phone number listed for Hawkins’ father, Ronald Hawkins, said it was a wrong number. Nobody answered the door at the home of Maribel Rodriguez of Bellevue on Thursday. Court records list her as Hawkins’ mother.

“As far as foster kids go, he was pretty normal,” said Ben Glass, 31, the son of Hawkins’ former foster mother Mary Glass. Hawkins lived with the family for about a year. “He was actually one of the easier ones to get along with.”

'Now I'll be famous'
Hawkins dropped out of Papillion-La Vista High School as a senior in March 2006, principal James Glover said Thursday. While he wasn’t a loner, he had a very small group of friends and was not involved in extracurricular activities, Glover said.

Jill Peitzmeier / Lincoln Journal Star via Reuters Debora Maruca-Kovac, whose family had taken in Robert Hawkins, is seen outside her home in Bellevue, Neb., on Wednesday.

“It was never a situation where he was out of the loop because people were picking on him,” Glover said.

About an hour before the shooting, Hawkins called her and told her he had written a suicide note, Maruca-Kovac said. In the note, which was turned over to authorities, Hawkins wrote that he was “sorry for everything” and would not be a burden on his family anymore. More ominously, he wrote, “Now I’ll be famous.”

“I was fearful that he was going to try to commit suicide but I had no idea that he would involve so many other families,” she told CBS’ “The Early Show,” Thursday.

Records in Sarpy and Washington counties showed Hawkins had a felony drug conviction and several misdemeanor cases filed against him, including an arrest 11 days before the shooting for having alcohol as a minor. He was due in court in two weeks.

'We saw the blood'
When the shots began, the store descended into chaos.

Mickey Vickroy, who worked in the store’s third-floor service department, said she heard shots and went with coworkers and customers into a back closet, emerging about a half-hour later when police shouted to come out with their hands up. As police led them to another part of the mall for safety, they saw the victims.

“We saw the bodies and we saw the blood,” she said.

Witness Shawn Vidlak said the shots sounded like a nail gun. At first he thought it was noise from construction work at the mall.

“People started screaming about gunshots,” Vidlak said. “I grabbed my wife and kids. We got out of there as fast as we could.”

Omaha attorney Jeff Schaffart, 34, was shopping with his wife and, after fleeing, realized he had been hit by two bullets, one in the upper arm and another grazing his left pinkie finger.

While hiding in a restroom, Schaffart said, he used his necktie as a tourniquet for his arm wound and put napkins on his finger to stop the bleeding. He was later treated and released at a hospital.

The sprawling, three-level mall has more than 135 stores and restaurants. It gets 14.5 million visitors every year, according to its Web site.

It was the second mass shooting at a mall this year. In February, nine people were shot, five of them fatally, at Trolley Square mall in Salt Lake City. The gunman, 18-year-old Sulejman Talovic, was shot and killed by police.

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