TIMELINE OF EVENTS - Westroads Mall Shooting - December 5, 2007

It was a classic Venus and Mars moment, and it nearly got Jeff Schaffart killed.

Jeff and Carrie Schaffart were shopping Dec. 5 for a red velvet Christmas dress for their 2-year-old, Maizie.

He knew Maizie's Christmas card photo was important. But to him, both of the lacy dresses his wife was considering seemed perfectly fine. He was getting frustrated with her indecision.

To Carrie, there was a difference, and it did matter. She was a little upset that her husband, in such typical male fashion, was not offering any input.

Antsy about getting back to work, 34-year-old Jeff wandered away toward the store's atrium.

There, he crossed paths with Maggie Webb, walking the opposite direction. The store manager was answering a call for more checking help in the busy girls department.

Schaffart turned and sauntered back toward the back wall of the store, where his wife stood, still pondering dresses.

He was barely into his return trip when the first shots rang out, so close behind him the air rocked.

With dark intent, and dressed to match, the black-clad Robert Hawkins came off the third-floor elevator about 1:42 p.m. The 19-year-old, a disaffected dropout with a long history of mental illness, was determined to take a toll in innocent blood.

The hand-scrawled suicide notes he left made it clear he wanted to make a name for himself.

As Hawkins stepped out into the elevator lobby and wordlessly strode toward the sales floor, he was already staring down the sight of an AK-47-style assault rifle.

Shots echoed through all three floors of Von Maur and out into the mall, past the holiday display where children could have their picture taken with Santa.

Boom-boom-boom! Boom-boom!

Some people immediately recognized the sounds for what they were. Others found it unthinkable. Gunshots in the mall?

Down on the first floor, Von Maur's pianist at some point got up from his stool to join countless others in flight.

By force of habit, he flipped a switch under the piano, the one the pianists hit when they go on break. Prerecorded piano music began to play over the sound system.

Almost every survivor in the store that day would later recall this: furious gunfire and panic, followed by endless minutes of paralyzing fear and uncertainty. And through it all, the festive holiday music played on.

Jodi Longmeyer, the store's personnel manager, had just walked off the escalator on the third floor with an armful of packages when shots rang out just behind her.

She turned and saw the young man and the flashing rifle muzzle, one of few people to get a good look at him that day and live to recount it.

Once she comprehended what she was seeing, she was gripped by a fear: Images of her two boys, ages 1 and 3, and their need for a mother filled her head.

She ducked, an act of selfpreservation fueled by raw, maternal instinct.

Hawkins strode from the elevator alcove toward the wide-open atrium at the store's center. His slaughter began.

Angie Schuster, the girls department manager, was manning a sales counter just off the atrium. The 36-year-old had just moved in with her fiance, who was planning to make it official and surprise her at Christmas with an engagement ring.

It was one of many dreams shattered on this day.

Firing over low racks of children's clothes, Hawkins hit Schuster, who suffered multiple wounds. She fell and died right where she had stood.

Webb, the store manager, was working the register next to Schuster. Hawkins felled the young woman with a single shot, killing her two weeks short of her 25th birthday.

Behind that sales counter, Schaffart was moving back down the aisle toward his wife when the first shots rang out.

"Get down, Jeff!" Carrie screamed.

Time stood still. It seemed to both of them as if he was moving in slow motion.

He ducked into the doorway of the women's lounge, next to where his wife was standing.

Moments later, he realized he was dripping blood on the elegant room's floor.

In his adrenaline-charged rush to safety, Schaffart hadn't realized he'd been shot through the arm.

Schaffart thought Carrie would follow him into the lounge, but she didn't.

Making her own split-second decision, she crouched amid the little Christmas dresses hanging on a wall rack, hoping she wouldn't be seen.

Great, she thought moments later. Someone's shooting a gun, and I'm hiding behind a toddler dress.

But still, something told her not to go into a room with no way out.

All around the store, panicked people were making the same kinds of life-or-death calculations, scrambling into rooms, burrowing into racks of clothes, running so hard their lungs burned.

Checking out at another sales counter in girls, Lynette Manning heard what she thought were firecrackers, so close she could feel it. She turned and saw a young man.

This kid is going to get in so much trouble for throwing firecrackers in the store, she thought.

But clerk Susan Bair saw what was happening.

"He has a gun!'' she cried out, reaching across the counter and pushing Manning to the floor.

Manning panicked. There was no exit to the mall on this floor, and the gunman stood between her and the escalator. But Bair again took control.

"Follow me, " she said.

The clerk led Manning toward a stockroom.

Sisters Colleen Warner and Shelly Wright were customers at the adjoining register. They didn't know which way to go, either, but saw a black coat moving and followed it.

The person in the black coat turned out to be Manning. All three women and the two clerks who seconds earlier had been ringing up their sales ended up in the stockroom. Two other employees and another customer took refuge there, too.

As shots echoed through the store, Warner placed one of the first calls to 911.

"I'm at Von Maur in Westroads, and there is a shooting, " she said, muffled shots audible in the background.

"Someone's been shot?"

"Yes, please hurry. There's still shooting."

Some of the women tried to barricade the door, which had no lock. But all they had to use were boxes of children's clothing. Manning picked up one box, realized it weighed about five pounds, and started crying.

"How is this going to stop him?" she despaired.

Hawkins stepped over to the atrium and leaned over the brass railing. With a commanding view into the store's lower floors, he looked for his next target.

Down on the first floor, Gary Joy had heard the booming gunfire.

The 56-year-old was a longtime custodian at Von Maur, reliable and well-liked as the guy who always had a new joke to tell. Despite his humble occupation, Joy had a degree in literature and loved writing poems and stories.

Cosmetics department manager Heidi Cvilikas saw Joy standing by the escalator near the Clinique counter, a questioning look in his eye. They exchanged a glance. What is that noise?

Cvilikas wondered whether the escalators had broken down. That always made a big racket. But this sound was different.

Joy walked closer to the escalator, peering up into the atrium toward the commotion above. The thunder from above suddenly got much louder. Cvilikas saw Joy hit the deck, so she did, too.

This was gunfire, she realized. She stood, grabbed everyone she could reach, kicked off her high heels and led a mad dash to a nearby storage room.

Cvilikas never looked back at Joy.

She didn't realize that he had not taken a dive.

Hawkins had shot him dead.

From the atrium, Hawkins had a clear view across the third floor into the gift department. There, panicked workers were scrambling.

Moments earlier, clerk Janet Jorgensen had been standing behind a gift counter with fellow clerk Christine Schomer and a department manager.

It was almost time for Schomer to go home, but she had told her co-workers she would stick around if things stayed so busy.

When Hawkins opened fire, they all hit the floor. As the shots continued, Schomer decided they needed to get out.

"We've got to run, we've got to go, come on!" she exclaimed.

As she fled, she glanced over and saw Hawkins, his gun raised, and feared she'd be shot in the back. But she made it to the employee locker area, where a back stairway led out of the store.

Initially, Schomer's co-workers stayed behind. But soon after, Jorgensen took off on her own urgent dash for the back room.

She got as far as the doorway. That's where a bullet felled her.

A methodical killing machine, Hawkins squeezed off shots in quick bursts, the empty casings clattering to the marble walkways.

At one point he paused to reload, easily accomplished given the way he had taped two ammunition clips together before entering the store. He removed the clip from the gun, flipped it over, jammed it back in and kept right on firing.

He moved around the south side of the atrium over to the east side, again peering down at floors below for targets.

And he found one in Gary Scharf.

Burning some time before he was to fly out of Omaha on a business trip, the 48-year-old Lincoln man knew something serious was going on above him.

The man who grew up on a farm near Curtis, Neb., easily could have run to safety. But he didn't.

"We need help! We need help!'' he yelled to fellow customers as he stood near a second-floor escalator.

He pulled out his cell phone, an apparent attempt to call 911.

But before he could get through, the cell phone clanked to the tile floor.

Scharf fell, too, his life snuffed out by a single shot.

At the horrific sight, a woman about to go up the escalator in search of two family members stopped in her tracks.

Up above, Hawkins turned away from the rail.

Then he set his sights on customer service, dead in his path.

Jodi Longmeyer was racing through the store just seconds ahead of Hawkins.

After first seeing him by the escalator, she had ducked down. But with shots booming behind her, she hunkered as low as she could and skittered through a back entrance into customer service.

She set an armload of packages on a table in a gift-wrapping room, where about a dozen wrappers had stopped work, wondering what was going on. Another half-dozen Von Maur associates were in an adjoining room, behind the customer service counter.

Longmeyer looked into the next room and saw Dianne Trent, a longtime customer service associate, squatting by a worktable and holding a phone. Longmeyer asked whether anyone had pushed the panic button, an alarm that would alert police.

Trent hadn't, but she was dialing 911.

"We're hearing gunshots in the store, " she told the operator, shots thundering in the background.

She suddenly spotted Hawkins and his gun.

"Oh my God, there's a young boy. Oh my God."

Hawkins, in all his determined fury, was bearing down, the shots growing ever louder.

Trent's tone became more urgent.

"Oh my God! Please send somebody fast. He's a young boy – he's a white boy with glasses. Oh my God!"

There were no more words. Just more deafening gunfire.

Hawkins stepped up to the counter, turning the customer service department into a shooting gallery.

Trent went down, fatally shot.

Fred Wilson, the kindly customer service supervisor, tried to crouch behind a counter. But Hawkins was moving around to get his prey within his sights.

Wilson was hit in the arm, the blast knocking him backward.

Wilson found himself down next to Beverly Flynn, a seasonal wrapper and mother of three due to get off work in 20 minutes, also shot by Hawkins.

Micky Oldham, a 65-year-old customer service associate, was counting cash in a back room when she heard the commotion. She opened a door onto customer service and found herself looking right into Hawkins' eyes.

"Oh no!'' she said just before two bullets ripped into her body.

As Hawkins blasted away, John and Kathy McDonald huddled for their lives just feet away. They were burrowed side by side behind a big armchair in front of the customer service counter, just to Hawkins' left.

They had been waiting for a gift to be wrapped. Kathy had just asked John how his lunch outing went. Before he could answer, the first shots had boomed across the store.

As the shots drew closer, she had suggested they get behind the chair, which they pushed closer to the wall.

Kathy turned to her husband of 40 years.

"I love you, " she said softly.

Then she saw Hawkins' head move past as he stepped up to the counter, firing away.

Longmeyer crouched behind a workstation in the wrapping room. Close by her was another worker who escaped the front counter just before Hawkins appeared. She had climbed inside another wrapping station, pulling the door closed behind her.

Renee Toney, the only other employee to escape from the front counter, rushed into the wrapping room hollering, "Gun!" All 12 wrappers followed on her heels as she fled to a back stockroom.

Longmeyer listened in horror to what was transpiring behind the counter.

During one pause in the shooting, Longmeyer heard Hawkins call out, "Open the safe, open the safe!"

But it seemed a ruse to bring workers out of hiding, because the words were followed by more gunfire.

Nothing could stop Hawkins. But it appears John McDonald decided to try.

Without a word to his wife, McDonald began to rise slowly from behind the chair that had concealed them.

Hawkins suddenly turned to his left and spotted McDonald.

In an agitated voice, Hawkins cursed McDonald, aimed and fired a rapid volley of gunfire.

McDonald slowly slumped to the floor beside his wife.

He looked as if he was sleeping, but Kathy saw the blood, and, immediately, she knew.

John is dead.

About two minutes after it started, and almost as suddenly, the shooting stopped.

Behind the counter, Wilson was lying on his mangled arm, contorted behind him.

The carpet was soaked in blood, much of it his own. Wilson began calling out.

"Help us! Somebody help us!"

The roar of gunfire had ceased. But for scores of employees and customers in hiding, the relative calm brought no relief.

They remained paralyzed by the fear the gunman was now quietly stalking Von Maur, looking to root them out. Panicked mothers struggled to shush crying, fussy children.

Adding to the tension was an alarm sounding throughout the store. Set off when someone went out an emergency exit, its incessant pulsing rang out, mixing with the programmed holiday music.

A recorded warning repeated: You have violated a protected area. Police are notified. Leave immediately.

To Kathy McDonald, it seemed an eternity as she remained frozen behind the chair in customer service, quietly grieving the husband whose body lay beside her.

Near customer service, Longmeyer could hear the cries of Wilson, her former high school teacher, but felt powerless. She feared giving up her location to the gunman.

But she sensed things were bad. Looking through the doorway into customer service, she could see a pair of feet down on the floor, motionless.

Across the room, a gift department employee bravely dragged wounded co-worker Janet Jorgensen from the doorway, where she had been shot, into the employee locker room.

In the women's lounge, Schaffart was tending to his wound. Shrapnel had passed through his forearm and sliced his pinkie.

Cindy Bailey, an Omaha hairdresser who ended up in the women's restroom with Schaffart, got a nurse friend on the phone for advice. While another woman held Schaffart's arm over his head, Bailey helped Schaffart fashion a tourniquet out of his maroon tie.

Schaffart was more worried about his wife, who was somewhere out there in the store.

Toney and the dozen other employees hiding in the stockroom felt defenseless. The room had no rear exit. And they were just 70 feet and two swinging doors away from where Hawkins had last been seen.

Toney looked around and saw only boxes of light bulbs and cleaning supplies as she tried to concoct some kind of MacGyverlike plan to rig something into a weapon.

If he comes through that door, she thought, we're all dead.

Like countless others in the store, Manning, Wright and Warner were praying.

After they and others hiding with them in a stockroom did their best to barricade the door, Manning had phoned her husband, thinking it might be the last time they'd ever speak.

"I just want to tell you I love you, " she told him.

Olga Zeisler, who minutes earlier had rung up purchases for Warner and Wright, was now their protector and rock.

A young woman with a thick Russian accent, Zeisler had grabbed a metal pole from a store rack. Bair, the other sales associate hiding in the room, took up a box cutter. They stood poised on either side of the door, ready to pounce.

"I am your shining star, " Zeisler told Manning after seeing her look of despair. "I will not let anything happen to you."

Wright nervously paced while her sister, Warner, sat quietly in a corner. At one point, Wright walked up to her sister.

"Let's just pray, pray for the people who are out there, " she said.

They asked Manning whether she wanted to join them. She did.

So the woman who minutes earlier had been just a stranger in a black coat joined hands with the sisters. They bowed their heads and silently prayed so hard the strain showed on their faces.

Time crawled. Five minutes. Ten minutes. Twenty minutes. Would they ever be delivered from this hell?

On Dec. 5, 2007, Omaha and the nation were shocked by the nation's deadliest mall shooting. After entering the Westroads VonMaur store, Robert Hawkins killed eight people and wounded others – two seriously – before turning his military-style rifle on himself. Here is what police and witnesses say transpired during a violent spree that lasted only about two minutes.

1. At 1:42 p.m., Hawkins comes off the south elevator. Looking down the barrel of his assault rifle, he heads toward the store’s atrium.

2. Firing over low racks of clothing, Hawkins fatally shoots Von Maur managers Angie Schuster and Maggie Webb as they stand by registers in the girls department.

3. Customer Jeff Schaffart, moving down an aisle behind the registers, is hit in the arm with a bullet fragment.

4. Reaching the atrium, Hawkins leans over the railing and fires below. He kills store custodian Gary Joy on the first floor.

5. Either just before or just after firing down on Joy, Hawkins fires across the store into the gift department. He hits store employee Janet Jorgensen as she attempts to flee to a back room.

6. Hawkins moves around the south side of the atrium to the east side. There he fires down to the second floor at store customer Gary Scharf, killing him.

7. Hawkins heads for customer service. He leans over the counter and fatally shoots store employees Dianne Trent and Beverly Flynn and wounds Fred Wilson. Micky Oldham is wounded after she emerges from a back office.

8. During the assault on customer service, customer John McDonald is shot and killed when he rises up from behind a chair, where he had been hiding. He apparently was attempting to confront Hawkins.

9. Hawkins turns the gun on himself. He fired 41 times in his rampage, with 18 shots left in his rifle.