Showing posts with label shopping mall. Show all posts
Showing posts with label shopping mall. Show all posts

Sunday, March 23, 2008

Serial Execution-Style Killings at Boca Raton Shopping Mall

BRIAN SKOLOFF writes:
[In December, 2007,] The 911 call lasted a split second. Not even a breath was heard.

It was Nancy Bochicchio's last desperate plea for help.

The single mom and her 7-year-old daughter, Joey, would soon be dead, each bound and shot in the head in the back seat of their black Chrysler Aspen.
March 23, 2007

Randi Gorenberg, 52, heads to the mall to do some shopping. It's a typical day for the bubbly, outgoing doctor's wife and mother of two.

Surveillance video shows her leaving the mall at about 1:16 p.m. She walks into the parking lot to her black Mercedes SUV.

Just over a half-hour later, at 1:54 p.m., witnesses spot her car driving through a park in nearby Delray Beach.

Then a gunshot.

Gorenberg's body falls limply from the passenger door, shot in the head.

Her Mercedes is found a few minutes later abandoned behind a Home Depot. Her purse and cell phone are missing. So are her black and white Puma shoes.

No one sees the killer. To this day, he's a ghost.

"It's been a very hard and sad year for me," said Gorenberg's mother, Idey Elias. "And whoever he is, he's still out there doing these evil things."

___

August 7, 2007

A 30-year-old woman and her 2-year-old son leave the Town Center mall on a balmy afternoon and head for their black Lincoln Navigator in Nordstrom's parking garage.

The woman puts her son in his car seat and loads her purchases in the back.

She gets behind the wheel and is startled to see a man sitting beside her child with a gun to his head. The gunman is dark-skinned, about 5'11", 180 pounds, wearing sunglasses and a full-brimmed floppy hat, possibly with a ponytail.

"Take whatever you want, just don't hurt us," she tells him.

The man orders the woman to drive to an ATM where she withdraws $600.

He then orders her into the back seat, where he binds her feet with plastic ties, secures her hands with cheap novelty handcuffs and fixes her neck to the headrest with another tie.

He's calm but threatens to kill her. She doesn't resist. They drive back to the mall where he puts a pair of blacked-out swim goggles over her eyes.

He asks if she's OK, even gets her a drink of water and her inhaler for asthma. Then he disappears.

The woman eventually frees herself.

"He took my license and told me if his picture was on the news that he would come after me ... and my son," she would later say. "I'm terrified."

She has concealed her identity from the public out of fear for her own and child's safety, appearing before reporters on the condition that her name and face not be shown.

Three days after she was attacked, the same man is believed to have robbed a woman at gunpoint in a parking garage at another nearby shopping area.

___

Dec. 13, 2007

It's just after midnight at the mall. A security guard making his rounds notices a black SUV idling in the parking lot and calls police.

The Bochicchios are dead inside.

Just 10 hours earlier, Nancy Bochicchio picked up Joey from her second grade class for a doctor's appointment. The inseparable pair then hit the mall.

They enter between Neiman Marcus and Sears and come out the same way less than an hour later, spotted on surveillance video, their long shadows trailing them in the afternoon light.

Video from a nearby bank then shows their car at a drive-through ATM.

Bochicchio withdraws $500. No one knows what happens next but the killer.

Both are bound in the exact manner as the August victim. Their eyes, too, are covered with blacked-out goggles.

Saturday, December 8, 2007

Memorial Fund for Victims of Shopping Mall Massacre

The Von Maur company, which operates stores across the Midwest, said it had established a memorial fund with the local United Way for the shooting victims and their families and invited public contributions. It also said it was helping families of the eight victims with funeral arrangements and grief counseling.

Police said Hawkins, 19, of nearby Bellevue, fired more than 30 rounds inside the crowded mall, striking 11 people. Six died where they fell, one died on the way to a hospital and another died despite 45 minutes of emergency treatment at another hospital.

Three other people were wounded, two seriously.

Troubling Choice: Freedom or Security

(Associated Press) OMAHA, Neb. - An Amish schoolhouse. A college classroom building, bustling with students and professors. An upscale department store at a mall, decked with holiday trimmings.

In recent years, massacres have occurred in the most benign settings, confronting Americans with a troubling choice: move toward airport-style security in a wide range of public places or fatalistically accept the slim chance that tragedy could strike anywhere in a free society.


Massacres are unlikely events; and Americans must not give up freedoms in order to remain secure. Security is actually an illusion. Just as a lock on a front door will not keep a burglar from entering one's home, neither will security guards and gates keep us safe from random acts of violence in public places.

If we succumb to fear, then we will lose. And, the terrorists, the crazies will win.

'I Just Want to Take A Few Pieces of (expletive) With Me"

OMAHA, Neb. - As police released surveillance images of a shaggy-haired, bespectacled Robert Hawkins taking aim at holiday shoppers, more details were revealed Friday about the teenager's suicide note, in which he wrote that he "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 wrote. “I just want to take a few pieces of (expletive) with me.”

The 19-year-old gunman left the note at the suburban house where he lived Wednesday before going to Omaha’s Westroads Mall with an AK-47 and opening fire on the midday holiday shopping crowd, fatally shooting eight people at the Von Maur store before turning the gun on himself.


Associated Press

Thursday, December 6, 2007

Young Murderers

MICHAEL ANDERSON, 24
ROBERT HAWKINS, 19





OMAHA, Neb. - The young man (Robert Hawkins) who killed eight people and committed suicide in a shooting rampage at a department store spent four years in a series of treatment centers, group homes and foster care after threatening to kill his stepmother in 2002.

Michael Anderson killed a young woman who answered an online advertisement for a babysitter. She was shot in the back by Anderson and a friend of his when she came for the interview.

Gunman Kills

OMAHA, Nebraska: A gunman wearing camouflage and wielding a rifle opened fire in a department store at a mall here crowded with holiday shoppers, killing eight people and wounding five, before turning the gun on himself.

The gunman, identified by the authorities as Robert Hawkins, who was 19 or 20, of nearby Bellevue, Nebraska, was described by friends as a depressed person who had lost his job at a McDonald's restaurant earlier Wednesday.