"Everyone Will Remember Me as Some Sort of Monster"

On an overcast Wednesday afternoon last December, a skinny white teenager shuffled into the Westroads Mall in Omaha, Nebraska, with an assault rifle hidden under his black hoodie. A cheery holiday atmosphere filled the aisles. Christmas trees twinkled, holiday music played softly. Nobody paid attention to the slouching teen as he got on the elevator in the Von Maur department store and rode it to Level 3. He came out with his gun raised: an effeminate-looking, almost pretty boy with alabaster skin and cherry-red lips, holding the rifle like a pro — stock to cheek, elbow high. Harry Potter with an AK-47. He crossed the hall to the girls 7-16 section, where, among the rows of dresses and frilly tops, he came across two women and shot and killed them both. The high-decibel blasts ricocheted through the store and sent the remaining shoppers into a panicky, screaming dash for cover, and as they ran, crying out in confusion, the teen squeezed off two more rounds, hitting the arm of a man lunging into a side door — then aiming at a man fleeing down an escalator, killing him before he reached the last step. The boy leaned over a balcony overlooking a central atrium, squinted down 40 feet to Level 1, where a janitor was scrambling to find a safe zone, and shot and killed him. Swiveling back to Level 3, he saw a woman ducking into an employee locker room, and he shot and killed her.

In the midst of the carnage, the boy changed magazines, loading in 30 fresh bullets. He walked over to the customer-service counter, behind which four workers were huddled. One of them, Dianne Trent, 53, had hastily called 911 and was describing a "young boy with glasses" coming toward her when the teen shot her at point-blank range, killing her instantly. He then shot the remaining three people behind the counter, wounding a man and two women. They collapsed in a squirming, bloody tangle. Then he turned around and shot and killed a 65-year-old man hiding behind a chair with his wife.

Barely five minutes had passed since the boy started shooting. Seven were now slain, four more badly wounded, bleeding into the thick-pile carpet. Behind the customer-service counter, one of the boy's victims was crying out, "I need oxygen, I need oxygen." She bled to death before help arrived. Police and ambulance sirens could now be heard approaching from the distance. The teen shot a stuffed teddy bear. Then he turned the gun on himself: one shot, under the chin.

At that same moment, in a suburban sheriff's office miles away from the pandemonium at the mall, a 41-year-old woman named Molly Rodriguez was consulting a deputy about her son, whom she feared might be planning to kill himself. She had discovered a rifle missing from her ex-husband's house that morning, she told the deputy. She wasn't sure of the rifle's make, other than that it was black, and ugly.

As the deputy compiled his report, news came in over the radio about the shooting at the mall. "Ma'am," the deputy asked, "might that be your son?" Rodriguez said she doubted it. Ten minutes later, the shooter was positively identified as Robert A. Hawkins, born May 17th, 1988, to Ronald Hawkins and Molly Rodriguez.

Her child.