Clackamas Town Mall shooting.
By Mark William Darus.
Portland Oregon USA: 12112012, a lone male wearing body armor and carrying an automatic weapon casually strolled into Clackamas Town Mall. Parking lot cameras saw his travels.
Once in, he began to open fire.
As bursts rang out, ricochet’s smacking off steel beams, concrete pillars and smashing thru a Hickory Farms kiosk, people ran for their lives in frantic fashion.
A witness told CNN he tried to help a wounded woman who was lying on the ground by a cell phone store.
"She had apparently been shot in the chest, and I couldn't get her turned over to help her," said Antonio Charro, who had been shopping at the mall with his daughters. "There was no one around. She wasn't breathing."
(courtesy of CNN)
I cannot imagine the screams of small children as their parents yanked their arms to keep them safe.
Take a second and try to place yourself their.
“John, we must get the to see Santa today. We’re so busy between now and Christmas…” a hurried looking Sara tells her husband.
“I don’t want to see santa, momma. He scares me!” a shy girl of six tells her mother wearing a dress she was placed in.
“C’mon dad, Santa does not exist, “ a male of 8 tells his dad. “I’m gonna flip off the photographer, dad!”
“Your mom is in the hospital. She wants to see you with santa!”
“yeah, right.”
“I’m too old for Santa-pics, mom! Can’t we go the FYE first?”
“This line is too damn long, Casey! I’m going to the car. You stay with them…” a tired looking man with graying hair says to his wife.
POP POP POP POP!!!!! Bullets ring out against the murmur of crowds, the gentle splashing of fountains and music filtered thru the mall.
You either honestly grab the hand of a loved one or you split on your own as you rush toward safety. Either way is okay as you only have to wake up with yourself.
Some create human shields, covering their young in a blanket of fragile flesh while others recklessly dive for cover hitting benches, decorative waste baskets and shrubberies.
In the tiniest amount of time, you make a single physical statement with your actions. This statement will keep you company the entire remainder of your time on Earth. Perhaps how you act goes back to your upbringing, school years or overall life skills, but you respond. And how you respond is seen by others. You see either their glances of wonder or looks of disgust based simply on what you do as your life flashes before your eyes.
Conflicted hourly workers: You alone know how you felt as bullet hits bone.
Did you run for shelter, attempt to assist patrons, scream aloud, cry furiously? It doesn’t matter and you should not feel ashamed for your actions. You surely know that you are little more than a tiny cog in a huge wheel. Most of you are smart enough today to know American companies don’t give a molecule of shit for their employees. You also know the biggest bullshit artists of these companies are the ones that offer counseling services after witnessing such things.
>>> Personal Note:Take it from me, go to any area of personal psychological events and they will find a way to fire you. The state will back them on this. I’ve learned a lot from this.<<<
To the workers of Clackamas Town Mall, regardless of your actions for the benefit of self or others in direct proximity, I SALUTE YOU! At minimum wage jobs, you should NEVER feel you did anything wrong regardless of how your bosses might say. They have pressure from their bosses, that would so freely state you somehow did an injustice to the loyal patrons of the store.
Like those execs would give your kids little more than an up-yours card had you’d been shot doing something heroic.
Clackamas employees, YOU DID GOOD!!! I
Let’s scramble some eggs on this skillet, shall we. The managers of this shops/stores of this mall. We live in such an odd economic world in the USA, don’t we? I’m quite certain 96 % of you have a sense of conscience, of the difference between right and wrong. I have to believe you knowingly consider what is best for you and your family before what it best for your employees. I firmly think you that as managers you react in a way and hold a presence of strength that inspires employees. I am sure you weighed these variables as the bullets flew about.
I implore you: Do not let your bosses ridicule your employees responses to this event and have you fire them. Stand by them as you did when the shots fired out. Don’t throw them under a bus. >I think most of you will though. You aren’t going to chuck a good job to help others. Not these days, not here in this economy.<
“Fuck, Martha!” Santa screams out as a decorative candy cane splits in half before him, shards of white and red plastic burst about. Santa’s elf’s duck behind cotton snowcaps and cardboards packages. A single happily smiling penguin loses its face as a shot hits it just below the nose, exploding it violently.
“I’m gonna die!” a shabbily clothes homeless man yells, liking the mall only for its daytime warmth during winter.
“Where’s the fuckin’ security here?!?” a slender blond finely dressed states as she crouches next to an Aunt Annie stand. She is smelling fresh baked dough, buttered, like that of a movie theatre and gun powder. More pissed off than scared, she wonders who she will sue for this derailing of her shopping schedule. ‘Someones going to pay for this,’ she thinks.
“Follow me!” a boss at a Spencers gifts yells to all in her store as she guides them to the back area for safety.
People do what they do during extraordinary circumstances. There is no right or wrong at the moment when the worlds of the rational and violent intermesh. Each responds to both their gifts and their flaws as they see fit.
The shooter is identified as Jacob Roberts. >>> know this point in history. He is the first shooter of a ‘thrill-killing/spree-killing type in my knowledge to possess no middle name.<<< Like the Colorado theatre shooting, where James E. Holmes shot many, I do not believe any motive will ever be found. Unlike the Colorado event, Jacob blew his brains out after killing three people.
As a writer and photographer, I must say to Jacob: You must have felt you were a failure with some profound justification to get even. I cannot imagine how low you must have felt as you decided to do this. I further have merely the smallest of clue as to why you would do this.
You died far beyond that of a fucking idiot and moron. You had body armor, an automatic weapon and some point to make.
You failed. Horribly so in your last endeavor.
Christians: I must ask this of you: If this man, some I’m sure would call him less than such, asked Jesus for forgiveness before his last brain cell was cut off from his personal kill-shot, would he go to heaven?
I don’t know about the rest of you, but I have more respect for a WallStreet pavement diver than this asshole after decimating others lives.
Automatic weapon, free view, potential kill shots at every glance. This sad man walked. Perhaps unequipped and unprepared for real world events as he pulled the trigger. Maybe he changed his mind as bodies hit the floor, heard the shrieks and saw the faces of tiny children.
A witness walking toward the mall saw him. She saw his machine gun and they looked into each others eyes. He didn’t fire on her and she kept walking.
How should I finish this entry?
3 Killed at shopping mall!
Do I need Kevlar to shop at Macy’s?
Should Santa pack a 9mm under his beard?
Just another sensational killing in America?
I have to laugh at that last thought. I laugh not because I am stupid or ignorant, just because I love the way media attention at such things grows them beyond the very same things that occur around many citiesUnited States every day of week on a regular basis.
Let’s do some small mathimatics, shall we? Just some numbers to tide you over. As you watch TV in reference to the Untited States, you see the killings, slayings and homicidal mania. You see these events more when they hit White suburban America more than anywhere else.
Columbine high shooting: 15 dead.
Colorado Theatre killings: 14 dead
Bart Township: PA. An Amish school 6 dead
Chardon Ohio school shooting: 3 dead.
Clackamas Town Mall, Portland Oregon: 3 dead. <and the Christian Science Monitor is all over why there are only 3 dead.)
I not only hope those 41 RIP, as I hope their families find some peace in their continual horrors they face every holiday.
I am a prick though and must point this out.
Over 16,000 people get homicidally killed in the United States of America every year. That breaks down to 43 humans a day.
That’s kind of cool if you think about it. 43 dead every day here. I guess it only means something if it’s someone you know, or if it hit’s a mall somewhere high profiled, right?
God knows, around me there is much in the area of homicide. Oddly, I haven’t seen a single bloodied body since the 1980’s when I found a babies corpse in a dumpster when I delivered for a drugstore, but I know many that have in the last 15 years. Just in my area (a space across about 5 blocks squared, there’s been about 18 homicides in the last 5 years,) Looking back, we of this ‘hood’ are reaching an anniversary when 3 people got killed within two dwellings of my house. My girlfriend tried to give CPR over a woman and saw her die. <this woman had just given birth a few weeks before taking a dirt-nap. A year after that, two people were chopped in half by a shotguns.
Bottom line: Many people get dead every day from violent crimes. This is wrong, though I believe most of these dead meet their killers at least half way.
Yet, in a shopping mall…
Jacob Roberts: Failure! You’ll either burn in hell, or be forgiven in heaven. I will talk to you though sometime….
Mark William Darus 12132012