Man opens fire in Tacoma Mall

TACOMA – At first it sounded like a kiosk had fallen over in the Tacoma Mall, but then people started screaming and Stacy Wilson spotted the gunman.

“He was walking backward and shooting. I couldn’t see his face,” Wilson, 29, said Sunday afternoon. “Everyone was running and screaming.”

Wilson ran with a group of women into a Victoria’s Secret store and crouched behind a wall. She heard 15, maybe 20 shots. Then the shooting subsided, and a store employee ran to shut a security gate.

Six people were wounded, one critically, and the gunman ducked into a music store, where he took three people hostage Sunday afternoon. Nearly four hours passed before the suspect walked out without a weapon and surrendered to a SWAT team.

Tacoma Police spokesman Mark Fulghum said the suspect was a young man, but he had no other details about him or any possible motives.

Police were interviewing the victims and hostages Sunday to determine what happened, he said.

During the standoff at the Sam Goody music store, employee Joe Hudson was able to pick up a phone call from the Associated Press and say he and others had been taken hostage. He said little more but could be heard telling others that he was talking to the AP.

Susan Serveau said she also called her daughter, Kathy Riggans, 24, a manager at Sam Goody, as soon as she heard about the shooting.

“She was upset and scared. She was crying,” Serveau said, waiting for her daughter Sunday in a parking lot near the mall. “All she would say was that she was OK.”

Authorities said they began getting calls about 12:15 p.m. that shots had been fired in the sprawling shopping mall. The first caller said there was a gunman, “He was in the mall, walking along, firing,” Fulghum said.

A man told KING-TV the gunman was smiling as he fired an assault rifle in bursts of four to five shots.

The man said he told his daughter and grandson to run and then hid in the back of a store with his wife and granddaughter. He says they helped a woman who was shot in the leg, bandaging the wound and wrapping her in blankets.

A woman who said she made eye contact with the “very clean-cut” gunman before he opened fire told Northwest Cable News, “When I heard the shooting I thought, ‘This is a joke.’ … I couldn’t believe this was actually happening, that someone would do this.”

State Patrol and police units from nearby agencies clustered around an entrance at the south end.

Betz Dejarnatt, who works at the J.C. Penney store, said workers were herded into dressing rooms and offices, then taken outside to a parking lot.

Six people were taken to hospitals, most with minor injuries, according to Tacoma Fire Department Deputy Chief Jon Lendosky. One person was in critical condition at Tacoma General Hospital, spokesman Todd Kelley said.