A Dark Day For Omaha

Omaha Mayor Mike Fahey said it best: "No words can adequately describe" what happened yesterday at the Westroads Mall.

In some ways, it was reminiscent of the horror New Yorkers experienced on Sept. 11, 2001. The wall-to-wall TV coverage, the massive emergency response and the aftermath that left many people scratching their heads over how this happened.

Dad was just a block from the South Omaha police precinct when an "all call" went out every available police officer in the city. He saw two police cruisers peel out of Vinton onto 24th Street, headed toward I-80. That was his first clue that something big was going on. It wasn't until he got home and turned on the TV that the early reports of a shooting at the mall started surfacing.

Dad called Mom to tell her he was OK and not at the mall. Several family members also called to make sure Mom and Dad were not at the mall.

When Dad picked up the girls, he told them what had happened. One of the first things Julia said to Mom was whether that was the mall where they saw Santa Claus. When she replied, "yes," Julia asked if Santa Claus had been shot.

Dad spent the rest of the afternoon (and part of the night) writing up some coverage notes for the Omaha City Weekly newspaper's "Media Watch" column. More than six hours after the shooting, when TV stations were still wall-to-wall in live coverage, several of the girls asked, "is it STILL going on?"

The girls also made this astonishing connection to the shooter, Robert Hawkins:


Hawkins is on the left.
Joe Jonas, one of the "Jonas Brothers" is on the right.
Dad made this connection to a previous tragedy:

Montgomery County Police Chief Charles Moose (from the Washington D.C. sniper shootings) is on the left. Omaha Police Chief Thomas Warren is on the right.