The Best American Crime Reporting 2009 - Jeffrey Toobin [28]
Barely five minutes had passed since the boy started shooting. Seven were now slain, four more badly wounded, bleeding into the thick-pile carpet. Behind the customer-service counter, one of the boy’s victims was crying out, “I need oxygen, I need oxygen.” She bled to death before help arrived. Police and ambulance sirens could now be heard approaching from the distance.
The teen shot a stuffed teddy bear. Then he turned the gun on himself: one shot, under the chin.
At that same moment, in a suburban sheriff’s office miles away from the pandemonium at the mall, a 41-year-old woman named Molly Rodriguez was consulting a deputy about her son, whom she feared might be planning to kill himself. She had discovered a rifle missing from her ex-husband’s house that morning, she told the deputy. She wasn’t sure of the rifle’s make, other than that it was black, and ugly.
As the deputy compiled his report, news came in over the radio about the shooting at the mall. “Ma’am,” the deputy asked, “might that be your son?” Rodriguez said she doubted it. Ten minutes later, the shooter was positively identified as Robert A. Hawkins, born May 17th, 1988, to Ronald Hawkins and Molly Rodriguez.
Her child.
IT WAS A BIG STORY. For about a week. Immediately after the shooting, the media descended on the woodsy suburb of Omaha known as Bellevue (population 50,000), where Hawkins had been living, and began some hit-and-run reporting. But that soon sputtered out. After it was discovered that the shooter had a history of mental illness, the national media left town, and then when it came out that he’d recently been fired from a job at McDonald’s, even the local guys dropped the story and went back to reporting on the weather. That was pretty much the extent of the digging, as if losing the opportunity to flip burgers was what drove the teen to murder.
Less than a decade ago, in the aftermath of the Columbine High School shootings, teen murder was such a horrifying novelty that it occupied the entire national conversation for months. But these days, teenage shooters come and go on TV with such regularity that their sprees hardly seem surprising anymore; on the contrary, it feels almost naive to be shocked. In the end, the Robert Hawkins mall massacre—the bloodiest episode in Nebraska since the Charles Starkweather murders of 1958, and one of the deadliest rampages in American history—amounted to just a few days’ worth of news and infotainment. Within two weeks of the shooting, Von Maur was speed-cleaned and reopened, just in time for the Christmas rush. In the atrium where Hawkins had sprayed bullets and slain eight, there was no lasting marker of what he had done: no plaque for the dead on the freshly polished marble columns, no memorial fountain where the victims had fallen. The aisles were soon humming with contented customers who didn’t seem to mind, or even know, that they were shopping in a former killing field. Only the presence of a new security guard, roaming the racks with a revolver on his belt, suggested that anything untoward had happened here at all.
From the very beginning of his life, Rob Hawkins was a throwaway kid. In 1982, Molly Rodriguez was working the counter at the Swiss Colony in a mall in San Angelo, Texas: a buxom, petite 16-year-old in white pants and a tube top, looking for a husband to take her away from being the seventh kid in a working-class family of nine kids. In walks Ronald Hawkins, young buck, rising star in the Air Force’s electronic-warfare division, and they hit it off: marriage