OMAHA, Neb. – Omaha police Friday released three still images captured from surveillance footage inside a shopping mall department store before Robert Hawkins' bloody rampage began.
One shows the 19-year-old walking through Von Maur's front entrance with an apparent bulge under his sweat shirt. It was an AK-47 assault rifle, police said.
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Another picture taken from Wednesday's tape shows Hawkins, his sleeves rolled up, holding the rifle with both hands in a direction toward the surveillance camera.
The third image showed Hawkins walking in the store six minutes before he returned with the gun.
His sweat shirt and pants were baggy and black, and the sweat shirt had a large white logo on the front. Hawkins was unmasked — his hair swept across the left side of his forehead — and he wore glasses.
Soon, the shots rang out.
For almost 30 harrowing minutes, Jodi Longmeyer recounted to a 911 dispatcher what she could see and hear of Hawkins' deadly rage.
As she told the dispatcher she could see Hawkins' body lying next to a gun, her voice cracked, and she began to cry — a mixture of sadness and relief that the crisis was over. Nine people, including the gunman, were dead.
"I had seen more than I wanted to see," Longmeyer told NBC's "Today" show Friday, describing the call.
Longmeyer, who is a human resources manager at Von Maur, agonized with the operator while barricaded in an employee locker room at the store. Tapes of her 911 call were released Thursday, a day after the tragedy unfolded.
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Click here to watch video: Witness Recalls Shooting.
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She saw the gunman step off the mall elevator on the third floor. He was dressed in dark clothes. She saw his gun, watched him open fire.
Then she hit the floor.
"I just saw someone up here in the locker room and she's got a lot of blood on the floor," Longmeyer told the dispatcher.
Minutes later, shaking and scared, Longmeyer was able to get into a security room, where she described what she could see on live surveillance of the department store.
She gasped.
"Oh my gosh," she told the dispatcher. "It looks like the gun is lying over by customer service. It looks like he might have killed himself," Longmeyer said, her voice rising as she started to sob.
Longmeyer's account, one of more than a dozen 911 calls placed during Wednesday's shooting, offered new details about what happened inside the shopping mall on Omaha's west side.
New details also surfaced about the gunman.
State officials said Hawkins spent four years in a series of treatment centers, group homes and foster care after threatening to kill his stepmother in 2002.
Finally, in August 2006, social workers, the courts and his father all agreed: It was time for Hawkins to be released — nine months before he turned 19 and would have been required to leave anyway.
The group homes and treatment centers were for youths with substance abuse, mental or behavioral problems. Altogether, the state spent about $265,000 on Hawkins, officials said.
The aftermath of Wednesday's killings left some who knew Hawkins questioning if more should have been done.
"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."
Todd Landry, state director of children and family services, said court records do not show precisely why Hawkins was released. But he said if Hawkins should not have been set free, an official would have raised a red flag.
"It was not a failure of the system to provide appropriate services," Landry said. "If that was an issue, any of the participants in the case would have brought that forward."
After reviewing surveillance tape, a suicide note and Hawkins' last conversations with those close to him, police said they don't know — and may never know — exactly why Hawkins went to the Von Maur store at Westroads Mall and opened fire.
But he clearly planned ahead, walking through the store, exiting, then returning a few minutes later with a gun concealed in a balled-up sweat shirt he was carrying, authorities said.
Police said they have found no connections between the 19-year-old and the six employees and two shoppers he killed. "The shooting victims were randomly selected," as was the location of the shooting, Omaha Police Chief Thomas Warren said.
Acquaintances said that Hawkins was a drug user and that he had a history of depression. In 2005 and 2006, according to court records, he underwent psychiatric evaluations, the reasons for which Landry would not disclose, citing privacy rules.
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.
On Aug. 21, 2006, he was released from state custody.
Under state law, Landry said, wards are released when all sides — parents, courts, social workers — agree it is time for them to go. Once Hawkins was set free, he was entirely on his own. He was no longer under state supervision, and was not released into anyone's custody.
"When our role is ended, we try to step out," said Chris Peterson, director of the state Department of Health and Human Services.
About an hour before the shootings, Hawkins called Debora Maruca-Kovac, a woman who with her husband took Hawkins into their home because he had no other place to live. He told her he had written a suicide note, Maruca-Kovac said. In the note, Hawkins wrote that he was "sorry for everything" and would not be a burden on his family anymore.
The shoppers killed were Gary Scharf, 48, of Lincoln, and John McDonald, 65, of Council Bluffs, Iowa. The employees killed were Angie Schuster, 36; Maggie Webb, 24; Janet Jorgensen, 67; Diane Trent, 53; Gary Joy, 56; and Beverly Flynn, 47, all of Omaha.
On Friday, Sarpy County authorities charged a 17-year-old friend of Hawkins who they said threatened to kill a teenage girl who had made remarks about Hawkins that offended his friend.
David S. Horvath remained in county custody, pending psychiatric tests to determine whether he posed a threat to himself or others.
Horvath was charged with intimidation by phone call, a misdemeanor.
Bellevue police found a rifle and two shotguns at the teen's house. Horvath's father said in court Friday that they were game weapons used by him and his son on their frequent hunting trips.
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