Jeremy and I had split up. He needed something from the Apple Store and Gamestop and I needed work clothes. I was just finishing in the dressing room when a woman came in. "There's been a shooting. I'm staying in here."
"But my husband is out there," I said to no one in particular.
I couldn't get a hold of Jer at first. Bad reception. Then I noticed the store was in lock down.
Finally Jer got through to my phone and his voice sounded garbled. He was all right but had been upstairs from where it happened. He heard the shots. He told me to stay put.
When the shots fired, people ran. It was a holiday shopping weekend at the mall; there were a lot of people.
I went to the cash register and paid for my clothes and tried to decide if I should go wait in the car. After another brief call with Jer, I headed out to wait. The parking lot was full of people in cars, trying to leave. No one was moving.
I tried to call Courtney to see if the news had picked up the story yet. We didn't know if the shooter had been caught or how many dead/injured. And I was still waiting for Jer.
He showed up and we decided to walk over to Barnes and Noble for awhile. Wait out the traffic. Courtney called back and told me it hadn't made the news ticker yet.
Later I sat in a comfy chair at Barnes and Noble, across from a woman and her young daughter. They'd been very close to the shooting but hadn't seen it. The woman watched her daughter thumb through children's books. The mother smiled nervously, sadly.
"She already knows it was a gunshot," she said.
"I hope only bad people got killed," said the little girl.
So ends day 22.
2 comments:
Oh my God, talk about big city excitement. Yet another justification for on-line shopping. Google "Southcenter shooting" and the first few hits are for a shooting in March. Perhaps it's time to find another mall.
It's too bad. They just renovated the mall and it's huge and beautiful. But not worth getting shot over though.
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