No, it wasn't a bad dream

Alone in the night

Terrors, and other dark thoughts, come in the night.

They lurk in the shadows, waiting for the witching hour, consolidating their dark forces for the assault on the lonely human soul. Yes, terrors come in the night.

WEDNESDAY, terror also came in the day to Omaha, my home -- to this stolid yet quirky city on the Missouri River. A tormented, 20-year-old loser screwed up one time too many, then listened yet again to the demon on his shoulder, the one telling him he was human excrement and to do something about it.

The Omaha World-Herald today quotes what that devil was whispering in Robbie Hawkins' ear, which he faithfully copied onto his suicide note: "I'm a piece of shit, but I'm going to be famous now."

Infamous, actually.

He took his father's old Russian SKS semiautomatic assault rifle. He took a couple of clips and some ammo, too. He taped the clips together, so he could reload in the blink of an eye.

Then he drove his used Jeep Cherokee to Westroads Mall and shot up the Von Maur department store. He blew away eight innocent human beings, then he blew himself to Kingdom Come.

Or somewhere.

BUT THIS POST isn't about young Mr. Hawkins and his Final Solution to a life gone south. This post is about the terrors that come in the dark of the night to a mostly tranquil city of 425,000, where the big news a couple of days ago was the Nebraska Cornhuskers' new football coach.

Well, that was the big news, until. . . .

Nebraska has seen nothing like this since the days of Charles Starkweather, who 50 years ago set out on a killing spree so notorious that it inspired Bruce Springsteen to write an entire gothic, folk-rock masterpiece of an album. But it took Starkweather a whole month to do what he did.

Omaha is reeling as I write this in the wee, dark hours. Christmas trees stand as blinking affronts to bereft families in houses that are one person emptier than they should be.

Spouses are dead. Friends are gone. Children are orphans now, in the black of this December night.

Terrors descend on a bereft, shell-shocked city. And we need someone to talk to. We need the light of a candle -- figurative, literal, metaphorical . . . I really don't give a good g**damn -- because we are just too bloody tired, and heartbroken, to curse the darkness anymore.

BACK IN THE DAY, I remember when one (or more) local radio stations would stand in the gap, helping beat back the terrors for a sleepless city. A city that dares not sleep for fear of what it might dream.

Oldsters like myself remember reassuring voices in the night -- friends as close as the radio on the night table. They were there, in the air, soothing our frayed nerves with good music.

They were there, taking calls from the wide-awake and brokenhearted (and even letting some of us talk it all out over the air and into the ether) when tragedy visited in bygone days.

They. Were. There.

When. We. Needed. Them.

The voices in the night were there when madmen shot the Kennedys.

They were there when a madman shot Martin.

They were there when Elvis died, and when a nut named Chapman killed John Lennon.

They were there through all manner of local calamities, storms and crises. But that was then, in a land called Back in the Day.

TONIGHT, for some unfathomable reason, I turned on the radio. On one of our public stations, the news . . . from the BBC. I switched the wireless to AM and tuned to KFAB, the blowtorch of the Midwest -- the station generations of Omahans listened to to see if the morning's snow canceled the day's classes . . . back in the day.

I remember back in 1988, when Omaha had been lashed by a line of hellacious storms, including at least one tornado. Much of the city was dark. The wife and I were struggling to salvage the contents of our fridge.

Our light came from wax, a wick and a flame, and our link to the world was a battery radio. It was tuned to 1110 AM. The DJ was informative, the music was middle-of-the-road, and the turntables ran fast . . . then slow . . . then fast . . . then slow, for the emergency generator was a bit hinky.

In these small hours, I sit here trying to make sense of the madness that came to my city Wednesday. And when I tuned to dependable ol' KFAB -- now just another brick in the Clear Channel wall of suck -- hoping against hope to hear a friendly voice in the night, I heard. . . .

Nothing.

THE TRANSMITTER was on, but nobody was home. Not even George Noory, who usually at that hour is chasing the spacemen on Coast to Coast A.M. Nope, at 1:07 a.m., there was complete dead air.

And complete dead air at 1:17. And 1:27. And 1:37, except for the ID and commercials that ran right on schedule at 1:32.

We're on our own. It's just us . . . and those terrors in the night.

If you're checking in from somewhere else . . .

Please pray for my city. This is our worst hour, and it has come just in time to mock a season of joy.

It would seem that in this place -- built up a century and a half ago from the hills on a harsh and unforgiving northern prairie -- the joy of our Savior's coming and the horror of his execution on the cross will be united rather vividly this year.

What Child is this who, laid to rest
On Mary’s lap is sleeping?
Whom angels greet with anthems sweet,
While shepherds watch are keeping?
This, this is Christ the King,
Whom shepherds guard and angels sing;
Haste, haste, to bring Him laud,
The Babe, the Son of Mary.

Why lies He in such mean estate,
Where ox and ass are feeding?
Good Christians, fear, for sinners here
The silent Word is pleading.
Nails, spear shall pierce Him through,
The cross be borne for me, for you.
Hail, hail the Word made flesh,
The Babe, the Son of Mary.

So bring Him incense, gold and myrrh,
Come peasant, king to own Him;
The King of kings salvation brings,
Let loving hearts enthrone Him.
Raise, raise a song on high,
The virgin sings her lullaby.
Joy, joy for Christ is born,
The Babe, the Son of Mary

Here's what we pray. Here's what it means.

St. Michael the Archangel,
defend us in battle.
Be our defense against the wickedness and snares of the Devil.
May God rebuke him, we humbly pray,
and do thou,
O Prince of the heavenly hosts,
by the power of God,
thrust into hell Satan,
and all the evil spirits,
who prowl about the world
seeking the ruin of souls.
Amen.

THE PRAYER to St. Michael the Archangel used to be recited after every Mass in the Catholic Church. It still is in some places, and we often take its words for granted.

Until. . . .

I don't know that we often grasp what that means -- or, at least, what it can mean -- when we routinely recite "be our defense against the wickedness and snares of the Devil" or ". . . Satan and all the evil spirits, who prowl about the world seeking the ruin of souls."

Today, in Omaha at Westroads Mall, Satan and all the evil spirits were on the prowl. It is not a pretty picture we receive from the Omaha World-Herald story today:

Renee Toney was working in the gift wrap area behind the customer service counter when the gunman came off a third-floor elevator and began firing shots into the ceiling.

"He was moving very fast," she said. The shots "were very, very fast, I would say closer to 30 (shots) in all."

A supervisor called for everyone to go into a stockroom behind the customer service area, and she rushed there, the others just feet behind her.

But she was the only one of her immediate co-workers to make it to the stockroom.

"None of them made it out," Toney said. "I was up front, and everybody except me was shot. It's a blur. I don't even know how I got to the stockroom. I was the closest one to the stockroom. Within seconds, they were shot right behind me."

A supervisor later told Toney that the man had said, "Open the safe." One of the employees moved to open the safe, Toney said. "She never made it to the safe. He shot her before she made it."

When police later arrived and ushered Toney out, she said she saw blood all over the floor and as many as six bodies, some on top of each other.

Mickey Vickroy, who was wrapping gifts at customer service but out of sight of the service counter, said she heard gunshots and some yell, "Gun!"

About a dozen customer service employees ran back into a storage area.

Roxanne Philip, another customer service worker, said the gunshots were so close that it sounded like they were being fired right next to her. She said she took cover and was scared "because I thought I would be next."

Philip said she never saw the shooter, but as she left the customer service area after police arrived, she saw that a woman on the other side of the customer service counter had been shot and appeared to be dead. She said she thought her boss had been shot because she heard him moaning.

Chuck Wright, a Von Maur employee, said a co-worker who also worked in customer service described hearing the shooting break out and people running. The co-worker saw what appeared to be a customer who had been shot and heard a co-worker in customer service yelling for help.

Someone yelled, "Hold on, Fred, we'll get to you."

Another co-worker of Wright's described standing on the second floor near the escalator and looking up toward the commotion. She then saw a man with a gun lean over a third-floor railing. He then shot a man standing next to her in the head.

LET US PRAY. St. Michael the Archangel, defend us in battle. . . .

50 years later: Just a meanness in this world

From the Omaha World-Herald:

The 19-year-old shooter died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. His body was found on the third floor of the Von Maur at Westroads Mall.

It was the deadliest shooting spree in Nebraska since Charles Starkweather's 1958 rampage.

DID YOU CATCH THAT? "It was the deadliest shooting spree in Nebraska since Charles Starkweather's 1958 rampage."

This month and next mark the 50th anniversary of Starkweather's killing spree across Nebraska and Wyoming, spanning December 1957 and January 1958.

I don't know what, if anything, that means. It's eerie as hell, though.

They declared me unfit to live said into that great void my soul'd be hurled
They wanted to know why I did what I did
Well sir I guess there's just a meanness in this world

-- From "Nebraska,"
Bruce Springsteen, 1982,
based on Starkweather

Death . . . the final solution

A troubled 19-year-old had some scrapes with The Man, some of the final bad moves of his tortured time on Earth. Then he got fired from Mickey D's.

THAT, APPARENTLY, turned out to be the last straw for the teen authorities identified as Robert A. Hawkins -- male, Caucasian, of Bellevue, Neb. KETV, Channel 7, has the details:

Hawkins, 19, had been arrested on a couple of misdemeanors in November and was due in court this month. One charge included minor in possession of alcohol. He was arrested on Nov. 24.

Sarpy County deputies said they are getting a warrant to search Hawkins' home in the Quail Creek neighborhood in Bellevue.

The woman who owns that house at 4302 McCartey Drive, who only gave her first name of Debra, said Hawkins had a lot of emotional instability. She said she thought he was turning things around. She said he had just learned that he was fired from McDonald's.

Debra said Hawkins was coming out of his room Wednesday morning when she last saw him.

"He said he'd gotten fired and was pretty upset and said, 'This is the only way,' and we tried to talk to him," Debra said. "He was just a very troubled -- I had no idea that he was this troubled. I don't know if it was because he got fired from McDonald's."

Debra said she saw Hawkins with a gun last night and thought he and her sons were going hunting, which they did quite often.

At 4:30 p.m., Rollie Yost, in the Sarpy County Sheriff's Office, said shortly after the shooting, Hawkins' mother walked into its office with a note that "could be interpreted as suicidal."

Yost said Sarpy County is working with Omaha police.

A friend of Hawkins, Shawn, told KETV NewsWatch 7 said Hawkins had been on antidepressants. He was staying with friends in Quail Creek, the friend said, and he said Hawkins had recently begun bouncing from job to job and making "some bad judgment calls." Shawn said he was shocked to hear it was the man he calls "Robbie." Shawn said he had heard through the grapevine on Wednesday that Robbie was suicidal.

Shawn said he last saw Hawkins a few months ago.

A KETV.com user e-mailed this:

"I went to school for seven years with (Hawkins) and he seemed to be a suicidal kid. During school, he would talk about killing or something along those lines."

WAS IT HAYWIRE brain chemistry, or was it a devil on his shoulder telling Robert A. Hawkins "Kill, kill, kill"?

Does it even matter? Whatever the source of the madness, the result was pure evil. The fires of Hell billowing up to Earth and into our lives.

Innocent lives snuffed out as quickly as rifle rounds could tear through flesh and bone. Death was the final solution for Hawkins, and he decided it would be the final solution for eight other Omahans he didn't know from Adam.

It seems to me that death has become our No. 1 solution for everything today.

Even for "an awesome kid," as related just now by one of his friends to a TV reporter keeping vigil outside the house where Hawkins crashed during his last days.

The friend found out this afternoon that his buddy had become Death, destroyer of worlds. TV viewers learned that this caused the lad to be "beat up about it for a while."

But then, in the span of a few hours, came the realization that "Life goes on, and I'll get through it."

Mass murder by your good bud. No biggie.

I REMEMBER reading Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness in ninth grade, it must have been. It comes back to me in times like these, all the more as our society becomes all the more like "The horror":

"Anything approaching the change that came over his features I have never seen before, and hope never to see again. Oh, I wasn't touched. I was fascinated. It was as though a veil had been rent. I saw on that ivory face the expression of sombre pride, of ruthless power, of craven terror--of an intense and hopeless despair. Did he live his life again in every detail of desire, temptation, and surrender during that supreme moment of complete knowledge? He cried in a whisper at some image, at some vision--he cried out twice, a cry that was no more than a breath:

"`The horror! The horror!'

"I blew the candle out and left the cabin. The pilgrims were dining in the mess-room, and I took my place opposite the manager, who lifted his eyes to give me a questioning glance, which I successfully ignored. He leaned back, serene, with that peculiar smile of his sealing the unexpressed depths of his meanness. A continuous shower of small flies streamed upon the lamp, upon the cloth, upon our hands and faces. Suddenly the manager's boy put his insolent black head in the doorway, and said in a tone of scathing contempt:

"`Mistah Kurtz--he dead.'

(snip)

"`His end,' said I, with dull anger stirring in me, `was in every way worthy of his life.'

"`And I was not with him,' she murmured. My anger subsided before a feeling of infinite pity.

"`Everything that could be done --' I mumbled.

"`Ah, but I believed in him more than any one on earth--more than his own mother, more than -- himself. He needed me! Me! I would have treasured every sigh, every word, every sign, every glance.'

"I felt like a chill grip on my chest. `Don't,' I said, in a muffled voice.

"`Forgive me. I--I have mourned so long in silence--in silence. . . . You were with him -- to the last? I think of his loneliness. Nobody near to understand him as I would have understood. Perhaps no one to hear. . . .'

"`To the very end,' I said, shakily. `I heard his very last words. . . .' I stopped in a fright.

"`Repeat them,' she murmured in a heart-broken tone. `I want--I want -- something -- something -- to -- to live with.'

"I was on the point of crying at her, `Don't you hear them?' The dusk was repeating them in a persistent whisper all around us, in a whisper that seemed to swell menacingly like the first whisper of a rising wind. `The horror! The horror!'

"`His last word -- to live with,' she insisted. `Don't you understand I loved him -- I loved him -- I loved him!'

"I pulled myself together and spoke slowly.

"`The last word he pronounced was -- your name.'"

OUR NAME.

Mental illness, or demons, or just plain garden-variety despair, or just plain meanness all have been constants in the human experience. What is relatively new is efficient means for maximum annihilation of those around us, as well as the mainstreaming of maximum annihilation as a way of getting our "15 minutes of fame" on our way out of this vail of tears.

The horror. Our horror.

Immense tragedy makes you do odd things

I am one of those people who notes the little absurdities and oddities amid great tragedy, how sheer urgency and a little panic makes people do odd things.

This is one of those moments and -- though I'm skating along the thin edge of propriety amid the horror of the previously unthinkable -- I did want to note one bit of media pretense and stodginess crashing to the ground and breaking into a million pieces. Because when it all hits the fan, you've got to do what you've got to do.

Like use the word "blog."

This happened at the Omaha World-Herald, which has been notoriously suspicious of this Internet thing . . . particularly the phenomenon of weblogs. In fact, "blog" (a.k.a. "live update," when the paper absolutely, positively had to commit blogging) was that Whose Name Must Not Be Spoken.

Until today, when immense tragedy pushed the trivial and the petty to the side, as old media and new did what they had to do. Today, instead, all of us were forced to focus on the Big Things in life.

And death.

Lone gunman, police think

The full horror of what hit this big small town -- hit it out of the blue this Christmas season, evil descending upon unsuspecting shoppers at the area's biggest mall -- is just starting to sink in as authorities begin to sort out just what the hell happened in Omaha this afternoon.

Right now, police say they think the shooter acted alone, then killed himself. At least 14 people were shot; nine are dead, including the gunman.

Asked about the camo-clad man arrested at a Westroads Mall transit center, a police spokeswoman said officers were rounding up anyone who fit early descriptions of the gunman. If the bus-stop man actually was trying to hide under a bench, and why, we don't know.

ALL WE KNOW is the cops think the shooter was alone. And dead.

According to one television report, the mass shooting may have been a murder-suicide writ large. From KETV, Channel 7:

At 4:30 p.m., Rollie Yost, in the Sarpy County Sheriff's Office, said shortly after the shooting, a woman walked into its office with a note that "could be interpreted as suicidal." Yost said the note is believed to be connected to the Westroads shooting. Yost said the note contained information from a 19-year-old man.

Yost said Sarpy County is working with Omaha police.

A REPORTER on KMTV, Channel 3 spoke of the enormity of what he'd just witnessed just now starting to hit him. I think the same is happening right now for most of the 425,000 residents of this relatively prosperous, relatively peaceful city on the edge of the Great Plains.

Stuff like this doesn't happen here. But now it has, and we have to deal with it.

Merry Christmas.

Newspaper: Nine dead at Omaha mall

The Omaha World-Herald reports nine dead in the wake of a shooting spree at Omaha's Westroads Mall. Police just confirmed this.

VARIOUS TV REPORTS still have one gunman dead inside Von Maur department store, and at least one suspect arrested outside the mall, apparently after attempting to hide under a bus-stop bench.

The suspect arrested fit the description of the shooter -- a black man wearing a camouflage jacket. Police are saying the shooter is among the nine dead.

All hell breaks loose a mile down the road

A sniper's gunshots shredded "peace on Earth and goodwill to men" in an Omaha mall filled with Christmas shoppers today, not long after President Bush flew out of this Midwestern city.

SHOTS STARTED ringing out in the Von Maur department store at Westroads Mall about 1:30 this afternoon . . . roughly. The Omaha World-Herald is reporting five dead and at least a dozen wounded.

Various television reports say either one or two suspected gunmen have been arrested, with police radio traffic indicating there also might be a gunman dead inside the store, shot by his own hand. Naturally, all is chaos at the moment, all reports are pretty sketchy, and no one knows precisely what we're dealing with, here.

I do know this: One gunman equals a nut; two equal a plot. And where there's a plot, there might be an incident of terrorism. Maybe.

May God have mercy on the souls of the dead, and grant peace and consolation to their families. And may He grant healing and peace to the wounded.