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Tuesday, May 11, 2010
The agonizing tragedy of a small community in Omaha
On Thursday morning of December 5th 2007, the city of Omaha was deeply patronized and shocked by piercing gunshots that echoed everywhere.
It was a normal day for everyone at the Von Maur department store in the Westroads mall in Omaha, Nebraska, United States, where customers were shopping for Christmas and employees were busy doing their work.
A 19 year old teen, Robert A. Hawkins, came in the door dressed in a black sweatshirt and a Jack Daniel's T-shirt. He wandered for a short distance in the store, then paused, turned around and left. Six minutes later, he returned and walked into the store from the same entrance, only this time he went straight to the elevator at his right. Suddenly, he stepped out of the elevator in the third floor and opened fire at everybody randomly.
He fired more than 30 rounds, and shot 12 people. Six of them died instantly, one died before reaching the hospital, another died 45 minutes after being admitted at the ER at another hospital, and 4 were injured.
An autopsy showed that Hawkins had 200 nanograms per milliliter of Valium in his system, which is a low end of its therapeutic dose (100-1500 ng/mL). There were no other traces of any other drugs in his system.
Turns out that an hour before the shooting, Hawkins' mother went to the Sarpy County Sheriff's department and gave him Robert's suicide note which had a mixture of his love towards his friends and family along with contempt towards his random victims. The note stated as follows:
"just snapped," "I know everyone will remember me as some sort of monster but please understand that I just don't want to be a burden on the ones that I care for my entire life" He went on saying, "I just want to take a few pieces of shit with me."
More threateningly, he wrote, "Just think tho i'm gonna be fuckin famous" “Now I’ll be famous.”
On Thursday, at CBS "The Early Show", Debora Maruca- Kovac (the woman who took Hawkins in because he had no where to live and her sons already had befriended him) said:
“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 also stated that Robert has always been depressed, but looked like he was getting better recently. She also said: "he was very thankful for everything and tried to help out all the time. He didn't cause any trouble… He wasn't a violent person at all..."
Hawkins had a very troubled past. He spent 4 years in a series of treatment centers, group homes and foster cares after threatening to kill his stepmom in 2002.
In May 2002, he was sent to a treatment center in Waynesville, Mo., after threatening his stepmother. Four months later, a Nebraska court decided Hawkins’ problems were serious enough that he should be under state supervision and made him a ward of the state.
He went through a series of institutions in Nebraska as he progressed through the system: months at a treatment center and group home in Omaha in 2003; time in a foster care program and treatment center in 2004 and 2005; then a felony drug-possession charge later in 2005. Landry said the court records do
not identify the drug. The drug charge was eventually dropped, but he was jailed in 2006 for not performing community service as required.
Finally, in August 2006 his father, the court and social workers all agreed that he must be released... about 9 months before he turned 19 n was going to be required to leave anyway. He was on his own since his release and no longer under the state's supervision, nor in anyone's custody.
Court records do not show the exact reasons behind releasing Hawkins.
Acquaintances said that Hawkins was a drug user and that he had a history of depression.
An official says that the state spent about 265000 dollars on his treatment...
For most people what he did was unexpected yet not surprising.
“He should have gotten help, but I think he needed someone to help him and needed someone to be there when in the past he’s said he wanted to kill himself,” said Karissa Fox, who said she knew Hawkins through a friend. “Someone should have listened to him.”
Though Hawkins is being labeled a monster, his best friend is still defending him.
"He wasn't a monster, he was a good person," Hawkins' best friend Craig Kovac said, though he also admitted, "I can t justify what he did", and added: "I feel really sorry for the victims".
Debora told the Omaha World-Herald that the night before the shooting,
Hawkins and her sons showed her a semiautomatic rifle. She said she thought the gun looked too old to work.
Police believe Hawkins was using that AK-47 when he stormed off a third-floor elevator at the store and started shooting randomly.
The victims who died in the unfortunate shooting:
John Mcdonals and his wife have been together for 40 years of marriage...
They were getting Christmas gifts wrapped at the Von Maur when the shooting started...
A trial 2 hide behind a chair unfortunately failed miserably as he got shot.
He died before paramedics could reach him
“He was one of the greatest people anyone could hope to meet,” Kathy McDonald said.
“He had a fantastic sense of humor. He was so accepting of people.”
John McDonald left behind his wife, two children and seven granddaughters
Gary Joy: A 56 years old employee at the Von Maur. He was a devoted son to his 91 years old mother. Gary died before arriving to the hospital
He was divorced, and had no children. He left behind his mother who lives the Omaha retirement community and an older brother...
Janet Jorgensen was an employee who has been working in Von Maur's gift department ever since it opened.
Almost everyone who shopped there seemed to know the 66-year-old Omaha woman because of her friendly, outgoing personality, said the daughter-in-law, who didn’t want her name used.
She left behind a husband, 3 children, and 8 grandchildren.
Maggie Webb was the youngest victim in the shooting. She was a business administration graduate (2005) and had transferred to Von Maur from a Chicago location earlier that year.
“One of my staff commented to me about Maggie, saying, ‘She was one of the good ones.’ They paused, and said, ’No, one of the great ones,”’ her high school principal Bill Burrus said.
Gary Scharf was on his way from a business trip in Iowa when he stopped at the Von Maur store.
"I’m sure he got in front of other people and took a bullet that might have hit someone else", said his ex-wife, Kim Scharf.
“There’s no doubt in my mind, I promise you. That’s who he is, to a fault.”
Scharf, 48, sold agricultural products and was devoted to helping people, she said.
Recently he helped a single mom get her car started, then got her address and
delivered a package of groceries and blankets to her doorstep, she said.
“I called him my Dudley-do-right,” Kim Scharf said.
“I’m not kidding. You’d never meet a more honorable and loyal man.”
Kim Scharf said the couple divorced about three years ago, but “he followed me out of divorce court and said we’d remarry in six months.”
They saw each other every day and were planning to get married.
Beverly Flynn was a gift wrapper at the Von Maur and was also a real estate agent for NP Dodge Co since a year before the year of the accident.
She used to plant a rose bush in the yard of the new homeowners as a move-in gift whenever she closed a deal.
“All we know is that a fine human being has been taken from us prematurely,
and that she and the other victims will be greatly missed,” said Sandy Dodge,
President of NP Dodge, in a letter to employees.
Angie Schuster, 36, of Omaha, was a manager in the girls department at Von Maur, where she had worked for nearly 10 years, Kenkel (her sister) said.
The department is near the third-floor elevator, which Kenkel said “she probably didn’t have any chance, any warning against the gunman."
“They said he got off the elevator, and she would have been right there in his way,” she said.
She was in a very happy place in her life. She met a man,” Kenkel said.
“They were so happy.”
Dianne Trent, a store employee, spent warm evenings tending to the flowers on her porch, drinking tea and chatting with her neighbor, Errol Schlenker.
“A very incredibly sweet person,” Schlenker said. “She was a middle-of-the-road American, a dedicated worker. She was just a decent person who lived a good life here.”
Divorced many years ago and with no children, Trent was 53 years old.
The mourning:
The ceremony was held at St. John’s Church on Creighton University’s campus,
where The Rev. Roc O’Connor read the names of the victims aloud, according to KETV-TV.
At least three of those killed and injured were Creighton alumni and had developed deep roots in the area.
"This is something that is going to hit home for everyone who lives here,"
mourner Robyn Eden told KETV-TV. "Small community--- regardless of how many people live here. This is a small town."
Witness Shawn Vidlak said the shots sounded like a nail gun.
At first he thought it was noise from construction work at the mall.
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 shooting spree was Nebraska’s deadliest since January 1958, when Charles
Starkweather killed 10 people in Nebraska and another in Wyoming.
It was a true tragedy that affected so many people. One man's illness claimed the lives of so many innocents along with his. A lot of people were and will always remain missed; it is like a void in that small community of Omaha appeared. These deaths have repercussions over so many lives and so many people have been damaged and traumatized.
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