Mall Shooter by Blake Kimzey

On December 15th, 2012, my wife and I went to a mall on the same day as a shooter. This was
the day after the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting. Danielle was nine-months pregnant
and very much due on the 19th of December. The Sandy Hook shooting was the first mass
shooting that we processed as soon-to-be parents, and we couldn’t turn the TV off. We wanted to
make sense of the shooting immediately, to understand how something like that could happen,
and we simply couldn’t solve for X. All those children, we thought. Those grieving parents.

A new kind of sorrow held onto us, a malaise that gripped us for an entire 24-hour news cycle
that reverberated for months to come. In the immediate aftermath of Sandy Hook we needed to
get out of the house and celebrate the approaching birth of our daughter. There was so much to
be thankful for. After all, we were almost three thousand miles away from Sandy Hook and
cloistered in a notoriously safe part of the country in Irvine, CA.

So we drove from Irvine to Balboa Peninsula. We liked to walk along the beach to work a
hunger. Yards from the crashing surf we talked about how everything was in front of us then, our
entire lives unspooling before us. Dolphins finned the surface of the water and expensive boats
claimed the Pacific horizon. On shore we talked about becoming a family of three. The thought
made us so happy. With all of our extended family living in Texas, though, we wanted to be
around people, to celebrate the Christmas holiday if even at the mall. Danielle and I had each
other. Now we wanted a crowd. And on we went to Fashion Island, a sprawling upscale mall in
Newport Beach, CA.

We had just finished eating at the Whole Foods that anchors part of the mall. Pizza and veggies a
la carte. Afterward we planned to stroll through the mall as Michael Bublé softly crooned Have a
holly, jolly Christmas overhead. We were jonesing for frozen yogurt and wanted to walk past
Santa Claus and see the gauzy window displays decorated for the season. But first Danielle and I
walked to the back of Whole Foods so we could use the restroom, stashed down a short hallway
adjacent to a utility closet and staff break room.

As I washed my hands, though, I heard people screaming. That didn’t sit right. It sounded like a
fistfight was underway just beyond the restroom doors. Lots of commotion, people and more
crashing to the ground.

Then I heard a woman shriek, “There’s a shooter, there’s a shooter!”

My stomach dropped and my ears burned with this unconfirmed news. How could it be, I
thought. I wondered if the woman had tourettes or simply liked yelling FIRE! in a movie theater
and had brought her act to Whole Foods. In the moment I saw myself from above and felt the
way I thought I would feel if ever in a situation like this: helpless, at the mercy of random chance
if what this woman was yelling turned out to be true.

I pulled the restroom door open with wet hands. I looked down the short hallway and there were
people running, knocking over wine displays, some of them shouting, their words garbled and
panicked. That was all the proof I needed. There was a shooter somewhere and the hallway
narrowed in front of me.

I thought: this can’t be happening, it can’t end like this. I thought of Danielle and our unborn
daughter. I thought of the end. Then I thought of the bright sunlight outside. I gained the end of
the hallway and peered around the corner, terrified. I knew Danielle was in the women’s
restroom, but I wanted to get an idea of where we would need to run, if indeed we needed to flee.
At nine-months pregnant, I worried that all of this bad business would somehow harm Danielle
and our little girl, to say nothing of what it would mean to round the corner and find the shooter
standing between us and the emergency exit.

At this point we needed to make haste. We were already behind everyone else headed to the exit.
The calculus I worked in my head said we’d lost valuable time. We would bring up the rear, easy
prey if the shooter followed the footfalls of an entire store funneling toward the back exit.

After surveying the wine and cheese section a final time, much of it in disarray with sample
cheese cubes freckling the floor, I ran very quickly into the women’s restroom and shouted,
“Danielle, Danielle,” looking around frantically, my neck on a ball bearing.

Danielle emerged quickly from the handicapped stall and whisper-shouted, “There’s a shooter!”

“I know, honey,” I said, trying to be calm. “I know.”

“What do we do?” Danielle asked.

We were both breathing heavily. She ran to me and we locked hands. Danielle was panicked, and
I’ll never forget her face at that moment: sunburned with shock. I imagined we were mirror
images of each other, save the fact that she was holding the rounded bottom of her belly, cradling
our girl. At the same time Danielle’s entire body leaned forward, balanced on the toes of her
running shoes, instinctively wanting to run.

“We can’t stay here,” I said. I knew we couldn’t. Danielle knew we couldn’t. If the shooter was in
Whole Foods we would be defenseless if he came to the restrooms, and I thought we needed to
try and escape. I didn’t want us to die cowering at the base of a toilet. I wanted agency over our
lives and figured we could follow the people running toward the back of the store, where a
Whole Foods employee had been waving people onward.

We left the restroom holding hands, determined to make a break for it. Half a minute had passed
up to this point. I was so happy we were together: Danielle, our baby swimming in her stomach,
and me. Danielle trailed me by two or three foot lengths. At the end of the hallway I peered
around the corner and scanned the wine and cheese section again. A few of the wine racks were
toppled dominoes, and beyond that an oven spinning whole rotisserie chickens. People were
running toward the back exit, and we joined the rabble.

My head was on a loose swivel, scanning in all directions. To this point I hadn’t heard one
gunshot, and that gave me hope. We breached the emergency exit. Standing outside we panted
like Triple Crown winners. People were running everywhere. Choppers rotored overhead. From
the sheer number of people it looked like someone had stomped a giant anthill and out came
holiday shoppers, running for their lives. It was a scene, and we were lost in the middle of it.

I grabbed Danielle. I kissed her on the forehead and held her.

“Are you okay?” I asked, looking her over. My body stifled the urge to shake uncontrollably.

“I’m fine,” Danielle said. “I’m okay.”

I put my hand on her stomach.

“And what about her?” I asked.

Danielle put her hand on top of mine.

“She’s fine,” she said, and added, “I love you.”

“I love you too,” I said, and realized we were still in it.

Congregating behind Whole Foods for less than a minute there grew a new terror: standing out in
the clear blue open, we were not yet safe. We weren’t sure where the shooter was, and we didn’t
want to stay around to find out if he was coming our way. So we dashed to the parking garage in
a mad sprint, where people were running with their loved ones in tow, trying to avoid cars that
were speeding away from the mall. It was chaos.

When we finally got to the car and backed out of our space we found ourselves in a traffic jam. I
feared the shooter would find his way to the garage and start shooting at the line of cars. We
were sitting ducks. The garage was claustrophobic. It took what felt like forever to exit, for the
evening sun to hit the top of our car, and when it did people were still running in all directions.
Cars wantonly sped through pedestrian zones. It seemed, ourselves included, that everyone was
looking out for themselves. In hindsight I wish I didn’t see the event as so singularly fight or
flight, every man and his family for themselves. But that is the way it unfolded. The desire to
survive was so strong.

I felt alone with Danielle as we tried to get out of Fashion Island. Survival seemed a solitary
endeavor. We were on our own. I marveled that a Whole Foods employee had signaled people to
the back of the store. She was calm and wanted people to see the exit. I don’t think she had to do
that. I thought of her afterward as the captain of a ship, happy to go down with it. I felt indebted
to this woman whose face I wouldn’t be able to pick out of a lineup. I would never be able to
thank her for the sense of calm she projected in the face of something so terrifying.

When we got home we sprinted up the steps to our apartment. We were nervous trouble had
followed us home, a completely rational thought at the time. I locked the door as quickly as I
could. I pulled the shades closed on the windows. We wanted to bunker. We wanted to feel safe.
I called my dad and brothers. I sat on the couch and cried into the phone. I was in shock. Across
the room Danielle called her aunt and her best friends back in Dallas. She laughed nervously into
the phone, pacing in the kitchen.

Before we knew anything of the shooter, his intent, or if there were any casualties, it felt like
anything could have happened and we feared the worst. We felt like we had escaped something
bad. We felt lucky to be alive. I checked local news outlets for any shred of coverage. But there
was none, at least not for several hours.

I turned to Twitter and searched for mentions of “Fashion Island” and found a host of tweets
from people in parts of the mall that had been locked-down. There were people tucked away in
dressing rooms in Bloomingdale’s, Anthropologie, Nordstrom’s, and Neiman Marcus. The local
news reports were vague for a day or two.

And then a YouTube video emerged showing the gunman, Marcos Sarinana Gurrola, firing 54-
shots from a semiautomatic handgun into the air in the Whole Foods parking lot. It was odd to
realize that we were never really in any danger. The gunman never entered Whole Foods or
stormed the mall. It was over before it began. A couple of Newport Beach policemen on bicycles
approached Gurrola and he threw down his weapon, apprehended without incident.

And yet 54 reports of airborne gunfire rippled through the mall. People were ready to flee when
they heard there was a shooter advancing in the parking lot. People were on edge in the large
shadow of Sandy Hook, ready to stampede.

That night Danielle and I sat on the couch and held each other. We counted our blessings. We
were tired, and after a time retired to the bedroom and locked the door behind us and made love.
It was the only sensible thing to do. We had had a day, and after all that running Danielle went
into labor in the dead of night. She was several days ahead of schedule. We had a home birth and
welcomed our daughter on December 17th, 2012. It was a beautiful experience, and we were
happy to be cocooned at home with a midwife and doula.

For weeks after the shooting, though, I got nervous going into big stores to shop and get diapers
for our newborn. I looked for the emergency exit as soon as I walked in. I walked quickly, my
neck still on that ball bearing. I looked very closely at the people around me, suspicious of
everyone.

We were bone tired as new parents. Life felt very fragile at the time. So many emotions swirled
around us. It took some time for the shock of Fashion Island to wear off, and we didn’t talk about
it much, unless we were telling the story at a dinner party with friends who wanted to hear about
June’s birth.

The first time I went back to that Whole Foods, half a year later, I had to use the restroom. I
remembered how that woman had shrieked shooter! and realized I’m oddly prepared for
something like that to happen again, to not feel surprised if I hear another person in another mall
yell shooter! For the second time in six months I stood at the same urinal and listened to the hum
of the outside world. I washed my hands and made a beeline to Danielle waiting at the front of
the store. En route I looked around. Everyone was happy to be there. It was a beautiful day. I
kissed Danielle and June, and then we went to the beach, the freedom and wonder of the outside
world.

Blake Kimzey has an MFA in fiction from UC-Irvine and is the Director of Writing Workshops Dallas. Mall Shooter is his first nonfiction publication. Find Blake’s short fiction in Tin House, McSweeney’s, and elsewhere. You can find him @BlakeKimzey on Twitter.