Von Maur Shooting

Author: Jewls Krueger

The Von Maur store at Westroads Mall in Omaha, Nebraska was full of holiday shoppers on the afternoon of December 5, 2007 when a 19-year-old named Robert Hawkins opened fire from the third floor. In roughly six minutes he killed eight people and wounded four others, then killed himself. It was the deadliest mass shooting in Nebraska history and the state's deadliest mass killing since Charles Starkweather's rampage in 1958.

The store, an upscale anchor tenant that opened at the mall in the mid-1990s, is still in operation today. A plaque inside honors the people who died.

The Victims

Six of those killed were Von Maur employees. Janet Jorgensen, 66, had worked in the store's gift department since it opened and was one of the top sellers in the entire chain. Angie Schuster, 36, managed the girls department. Gary Joy, 56, was known for knowing every coworker's name and always having a joke ready. Beverly Flynn, 47, wrapped gifts during the holidays and sold real estate the rest of the year. Dianne Trent, 53, was a quiet, dedicated worker who lived alone in northwest Omaha. Maggie Webb, 24, had recently transferred from a Chicago store and was the youngest person killed.

The two customers were Gary Scharf, 48, an agricultural products salesman from the Lincoln area who had stopped at the store on his way home from a business trip, and John McDonald, 65, a retiree from Council Bluffs, Iowa, who was at the store with his wife to have Christmas gifts wrapped.

Who Was Robert Hawkins?

Robert Hawkins was 19 and had a long, documented history of instability. He was born in 1988 to parents serving in the U.S. Air Force and grew up in a chaotic home. He was first hospitalized at the age of four after violent behavior in preschool and was later diagnosed with attention deficit disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder.

The day after he turned 14, Hawkins was placed in a mental health treatment center for threatening to kill his stepmother. He soon became a ward of the state of Nebraska, a status that lasted nearly four years. In 2005 he was expelled from Fort Calhoun High School for trying to sell drugs to classmates. He later attended another high school, dropped out, and earned a GED.

In the summer of 2007, Hawkins tried to enlist in the Army but was turned down because of his mental health record. In the weeks before the shooting he was fired from a McDonald's job, reportedly for stealing $17, and had broken up with his girlfriend. About an hour before the attack, his mother gave a suicide note he had written to the Sarpy County Sheriff's Department. In it, he wrote that he was "gonna be fuckin famous."

The Shooting

Surveillance footage showed Hawkins entering the south doors of the Von Maur store at about 1:36 p.m., unarmed. He walked a short distance inside, looked around, turned, and left. He returned about six minutes later carrying a WASR-10 semi-automatic rifle, a commercial copy of an AK-pattern weapon that he had taken from his stepfather's home. Two 30-round magazines were taped together, and the rifle was hidden under his sweatshirt. He took the elevator to the third floor.

At 1:43 p.m. he stepped off the elevator and began firing. He first shot two women standing near a clothing rack, then fired down through the store's open atrium, killing two men on the floors below. He shot two more people on the third floor, one fatally, before reaching the customer service desk, where he killed three more. Hawkins fired 41 rounds in all before killing himself.

Including Hawkins, nine people died. Four others who were shot survived, two of them critically. Omaha police reached the store within minutes of the first 911 call, but the shooting was already over.

Recent Developments

One of the critically wounded survivors, customer service employee Micheale "Mickey" Oldham, never fully recovered from her injuries. She died in 2016, and some in Omaha consider her the ninth victim of the shooting.

The case has been revisited many times in the years since. Hawkins was the subject of the 2016 series premiere of Investigation Discovery's Evil Lives Here, and his mother spoke publicly about the tragedy more than once. Each December, Von Maur and the Omaha community publicly remember the eight people who were killed.

The Store Today

The Von Maur department store is still open at Westroads Mall, the largest shopping center in Nebraska. The mall sits in central-west Omaha near the interchange of Interstate 680 and Dodge Street, also known as U.S. Highway 6. A plaque on the store's first floor, near the escalators, lists the names of all eight people killed on December 5, 2007.

Westroads Mall is a busy, active shopping center, and the Von Maur remains a working store staffed by people who serve customers every day. Visitors who come to see the site should treat it as the place of business and quiet memorial that it is, and be mindful that some employees and families in the community still carry the memory of that afternoon.