Chilling 911 Calls Reveal Horror Of Omaha Mall Shooting

It is a moment frozen in time and tape, a description of an ‘as it happens’ emergency no one should ever have to endure. But Jodi Longmeyer is one of hundreds who did. She was at an Omaha, Nebraska shopping mall Wednesday, when a 19-year-old gunman rampaged through the complex, killing eight people and wounding five others before turning his lethal weapon on himself.

Now authorities have released the 911 call that Longmeyer made to summon help, even as she was trying to hide from the crazed killer.  The mall’s manager of human resources watched in stunned horror from an employee locker room as Robert A. Hawkins calmly stepped off an elevator and begun randomly shooting at anyone in his path. His swath of destruction took just six minutes, but Longmeyer spent half an hour on her cell phone with the 911 dispatcher, describing the chaotic scene.

“He came up the elevator and opened fire in the elevator area,” the breathless employee told the emergency responder. From there the conversation evokes the terror of the moment.

Operator: “Walked off the elevator and started firing?”

Longmeyer: “He started firing in the air.” She then starts describing the weapon, which cops think was an AK-47 assault rifle the killer stole from his stepfather.

Longmeyer: “It was large. It was a very, very large gun.”

Operator: “Was it like a pistol type gun?”

Longmeyer: “It was big. It had, God. It looked like it wasn’t a rifle. It looked like an automatic type of gun.”

When silence prevailed several minutes later, the terrified woman found the courage to emerge from hiding and sneak over to where a security camera monitor was sitting. “Oh my gosh,'” she gasps. “Wait a minute … It looks like the gun is lying over by customer service. There’s an officer there now. I wonder if he … there by customer service. … It looks like he might have killed himself.”

She starts to cry before confirming that Hawkins is dead.

Other 911 calls were equally chilling, including the whispers of a woman trying to stay out of the rampaging gunman’s eyesight.

Woman: “I haven’t seen anything. I am hiding in a clothes rack.”

Operator: “OK. We’re on our way out there, ma’am.”

Woman: “I mean, there’s been like, 50 gunshots.”

Another caller was unable to say if anyone was hit, but the sound of a woman screaming in the background drowns her out. “Oh my God!,” the voice wails. “Everybody’s shot up in there! Oh my God, help us!”

Police have revealed Hawkins had a troubled past, had just lost his job and recently broke up with his girlfriend, classic “spree killer” triggers. The drug user suffered from depression, frequently talked of suicide and spent four years in group homes and foster care after threatening to kill his stepmother in 2002. He was released in August 2006, when officials agreed he was no longer a threat and when his 19th birthday meant he would have to be set free without compelling reasons to detain him. Authorities didn’t find any and since then, he’s been on his own.

“It was not a failure of the system to provide appropriate services,” defends Todd Landry of Nebraska’s Children and Family Services. “If that was an issue, any of the participants in the case would have brought that forward.”

Cops may never know the motive for the killings, beyond Hawkins’ own suicide note that talked of wanting to be ‘famous.’ But they say his murderous plot was well planned out, likely meaning he had it in mind for some time.