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ANOTHER TRAGEDY: Mourners at a prayer service held in Omaha's St John's Church for the eight people who were gunned down in a mall. -- PHOTO: AFP
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OMAHA (NEBRASKA) - AMERICANS struggled yesterday to come to grips with the latest deadly shooting incident in the country which has cast a pall over the festive season.
Churches across Omaha on Thursday held memorial services for the victims of Wednesday's tragedy in a suburban mall as shopping centres across America stepped up security.
Less than 24 hours after a teenage gunman unleashed a hail of bullets which left eight people dead before turning the gun on himself, hundreds gathered for a sombre prayer service in Saint John's Church on the Creighton University campus in Omaha.
Bells rang, one for each victim, as people lit candles.
Von Maur department store employee Lisa Wiemers said: 'It's devastating to me that this can happen close to home.'
The soul-searching continued as the authorities in the US scoured surveillance recordings, text messages, voice mail and letters that the gunman sent shortly before he stepped from a third-floor elevator in a shopping mall on Wednesday afternoon and turned a few hours of Christmas shopping enjoyment into six minutes of sheer terror.
A picture has slowly emerged of the sequence of events.
A video surveillance camera at the Westroads Mall shows that gunman Robert Hawkins, 19, walked through the main entrance of the Von Maur store, looked around briefly and then left before entering the store again six minutes later, carrying what was later found to be a rifle.
'He appeared to be concealing something balled up in a hooded sweatshirt,' police chief Thomas Warren said at a televised news conference on Thursday.
Hawkins then took an elevator to the store's third floor 'and, upon exiting the elevator, he immediately started firing shots'.
A few terrifying minutes later, eight people were left dead in the crowd of panicked holiday shoppers and employees, and Hawkins had turned the weapon on himself, dying almost instantly.
His behaviour upon entering the mall had been enough to draw the notice of unarmed security guards, said Mr Warren, but by the time the officers arrived, the shooting was over.
'From the time he entered the store to the time he rode up on the elevator, mall security did not have a chance to intervene,' he said.
Mr Warren was joined at the news conference by Nebraska governor Dave Heineman and Omaha mayor Mike Fahey.
Together, they provided more details about Hawkins' troubled life and identified the eight people he killed.
'These were innocent people going about their daily lives, performing their jobs and shopping for the holiday,' Mr Fahey said. 'This was an ugly act of cowardice.'
The victims ranged in age from a woman who was 14 days from her 25th birthday to a 66-year-old woman who had wrapped gifts in the store since it opened.
The mall is due to re-open on Saturday, but the Von Maur department store will remain closed for now.
Police said they had been unable to confirm why Hawkins chose that mall, but said it was possibly picked because it was a busy public place near the home of a friend that Hawkins had visited shortly before the shootings to deliver one of many farewell messages.
The terror of staff and shoppers was evident in one of the first 911 calls made to the Omaha Police Department shortly after lunch time on Wednesday: There was no voice on the line; the only audible sound was a rapid succession of gunfire in the distance.
Police said there were no reports of conversation between the gunman and shoppers.
They later recovered an AK-47-style semi-automatic weapon inside Von Maur, which the authorities said Hawkins had apparently stolen from his stepfather.
He carried two magazines with 30 rounds each, the police chief said, that 'had the capacity to fire multiple rounds in a short period of time'.
Mall industry officials say such tragedies are difficult to prevent.
American shoppers are reluctant to accept measures that would force them to go through metal detectors or be frisked by guards to enter their beloved malls, said Mr Malachy Kavanagh, spokesman for the International Council of Shopping Centres.
'We hope that we will not get to that point in this country because we live in a free society and respect people's right to travel unimpeded,' he said.
NEW YORK TIMES, AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE
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