Columbia mall shooting witnesses recall terror, uncertainty

David Roberts was finishing up a haircut at the Cavallaro & Co. salon on the second floor of the Mall in Columbia when he heard the first shot. He looked at another employee, wondering if they should be concerned.
"When we heard the second, that's when we were like, 'We need to go,'" said the 46-year-old stylist.
Directly across from the salon, three people had been shot at Zumiez, a skating apparel store, he said. He initially shuffled employees and customers out of the back of the salon, then came back for an employee who was hidden under a desk, and saw three bodies on the ground.

"It was very obvious that they were deceased," Roberts said.
Roberts said he saw one body inside of the store, and two were laying out front.
At an afternoon news conference, police said they do not have a motive for Saturday's shooting and could not confirm the genders of the victims.

On the other side of the mall, Meredith Curtis-Goode was with her mother and young daughter, who was playing in a children's play area when suddenly people started moving en masse toward the J.C. Penney store. Then she heard several distinctive shots.

Curtis-Goode said she grabbed her daughter, pinning her to her side, and moved quickly inside of the H&M Store. She then locked herself inside the bathroom with another woman and child.
"My daughter is four, and the other boy was three. We just wanted to make it not scary," said Curtis-Goode, who is the communications director for the American Civil Liberties Union of Maryland.
People at the mall rushed out so quickly, many of them left their belongings behind and were unable to get home. Wanda Davila, 54, of Abingdon, an area manager for a cleaning company that works at the mall, was meeting with co-workers in the food court when she heard the shots coming from upstairs. She ducked into the back area of a Chick-fil-A store, leaving her coat and car keys behind and outside of the AMC Theater. She wondered how she would get them back.

Similarly, Laura McKindles, who works at a kiosk at the mall, fled into a perfume store after hearing a "rapid succession of gunshots," and left behind her "house keys, wallet, everything." She spoke to a reporter as she boarded a school bus taking her and others to Howard County Community College.
Jennifer Duchman Griffin, who works part-time at Sephora, on the mall's upper level, said the store's staff kicked into action as soon as they got word of the shooting.

"We got an alert saying the mall was on lockdown," said Griffin, a local advertising manager at the Baltimore Sun. Sephora had an emergency plan in place: "We shut the doors and locked them."
She said she and about 14 other people went to the skin care section at the back of the store for shelter.

"Everybody stayed quiet," she said. "We were all reading our phones, texting... we stayed hidden."
When police came to escort her and the others out of the store, "it was hands in the air, stay to the left and walk out," she said.

"All I could think of is it's just like Columbine... this was the single scariest moment of my life."
Lauryn Stapleton, 18, of Columbia, was preparing for another day at work at Cartoon Cuts, a children's barber shop at the mall, when her boss asked for her to get her food at McDonald's.
The first shot sounded like somebody had dropped something from the top level, "something like a brick or something," she said.

"And then I heard [someone yell] 'Shots fired.' …," Stapleton said. "It just kept going and going and going."

Asked what she told the kids – there were 10 kids inside the barber shop -- when she got back to her job: "You've got to stay as calm as you can and just tell them everything's going to be OK and hug them and keep them safe," Stapleton said, fighting back tears.

Stapleton's mother, Robin, had just dropped her daughter off at work when she received a frantic call from her as she was barricaded in the mall.

"When you first hear it, it's like you've lost your child," Robin Stapleton said. "She was talking to me but you're fearful. You don't know what's going on and she didn't know where the shooter was. … I thought I lost her because I couldn't be there for her."

Sphere: Related Content