TACOMA – After hours as a hostage in a shopping mall, Jon Black saw the distraught young gunman working the action of his assault rifle.
“I was thinking, OK, he’s either flipped – or we’re getting out of here,” Black recalled Monday.
Then the gunman, with tears in his eyes and the look of “a scared kid,” removed the clip and emptied the chamber. Black and another hostage, fellow Army man Joe Hudson, stepped in to help end the ordeal.
“That’s when me and Joe went forward and helped him do the rest – take the weapons away from him, put them off to the side,” Black said. “Me and Joe stayed with him, talked to him, and then walked him out.”
It was the end of a shooting rampage that erupted Sunday during a busy shopping weekend at the Tacoma Mall, leaving six people wounded, one critically.
Dominick Sergio Maldonado, 20, of Tacoma pleaded innocent Monday to charges of first-degree assault, kidnapping and unlawful firearm possession. He was ordered held on $2 million bail after his hearing in Pierce County Superior Court.
Authorities said a police dispatcher received a call seconds before the shooting began, saying the shooting was about to start. To find him, the male caller said, police should “just follow the screams.”
Plans for making bombs and the poison ricin were later found in Maldonado’s room, prosecutors said.
In charging documents released just before the initial court appearance, prosecutors said Maldonado denied intending to actually shoot anyone, but was trying to draw media attention. Deputy prosecutor Phil Sorensen said he doubted that story.
“I’m surprised we’re not looking at multiple fatalities,” Sorensen said after Monday’s court hearing. “I don’t believe he was trying to wing anybody.”
Defense lawyer Sverre Staurset said he was eager to find out what drove Maldonado to go to the mall with guns.
“The thing to try to figure out here is, how does an otherwise attractive young man, 20 years old, end up on a Sunday in a mall with a gun? Something like this has got to have a genesis,” Staurset said.
According to court documents, Maldonado told detectives he had been humiliated during a difficult childhood and that recent problems made him want to be “heard.”
A text message to an ex-girlfriend minutes before the rampage said he was about to show the world his anger, the woman said.
Of the six people wounded in Sunday’s attack, only one remained in the hospital Monday afternoon, police said. Two others were shot at, but not struck, and four individuals were taken hostage, prosecutors said.
Police said Maldonado fired more than 20 shots. He surrendered about four hours after ducking into a music store and taking the hostages, all of whom were released unharmed, authorities said.
One hostage, a boy about 10 years old, was released early in the standoff. Two music store employees – Hudson and Katherine Riggans – and Black remained for hours, talking with Maldonado and attempting to get him to surrender.
“The look in his eyes toward the end was a scared kid,” said Black, 32, an active duty Army soldier. “He had tears in his eyes when we were taking the weapons away from him and he was in tears as we were taking him out.”
Black also gave credit to Riggans and Hudson for helping to calm the gunman and end the standoff peacefully. Court papers said Hudson, who had served as an Army medic in Iraq, told police “that he was more frightened inside the store than he ever was in Iraq.”
Tiffany Robison, 20, Maldonado’s former girlfriend, said in an interview broadcast Monday on ABC’s “Good Morning America” that he sent her a text message shortly before noon reading: “Today is the day that the world will know my anger.”
“I think honestly that he just wanted attention. It’s the sick attention that he wanted,” Robison told ABC. She said they broke up months earlier “because of an issue with a drug.”
Her mother, Mary Simon, 47, of Tacoma, said she thought the message was just an attempt to get attention. But Robison never doubted the violent implications.
“When she got the message, she freaked out and took it very seriously,” Simon told The Associated Press. “And then when she heard about the shooting, she knew in an instant that it was him.”
Later, Robison got a call from Maldonado at the mall during the shooting rampage and hostage standoff.
“He just said, ‘Well, I just shot up the mall, and I’m busy now. I’m still in the Sam Goody,’” Simon said.
The youths dated for a time, but Simon said her daughter ended the relationship when Maldonado’s behavior began to change, perhaps from drug abuse.
“She said he made a lot of changes and said a lot of things that spooked her, and so she broke it off,” Simon said.
Maldonado was charged with eight counts of assault, four counts of kidnapping, and two counts of unlawful possession of a firearm.
One person remained in critical condition Monday at Tacoma General Hospital, spokesman Todd Kelley said. Prosecutors identified him as Brendan McKown, and said he suffered paralysis and critical internal injuries. The other wounded people all had been released from hospitals.
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