It was tough getting in contact with David Keating on Friday. While trying, I heard his phone message.
“You’ve reached the voice mailbox of David Keating, director of corporate communications for General Growth Properties. As a company, we want to extend our condolences and our thoughts and prayers to the victims of the tragedy in Omaha,” the message said.
Without mentioning the gunman’s spree that killed eight people at Westroads Mall on Wednesday, the message also expressed concern for families who lost loved ones.
When I did speak with Keating, he sounded exhausted to the point of tears. “The safety and well-being of our shoppers is always our top concern,” he said from the company’s Chicago headquarters.
My reason for calling wasn’t Omaha, but Alderwood. The Lynnwood mall is owned and operated by General Growth Properties Inc., which also owns Westroads Mall in Omaha, Neb., and about 200 others around the country.
Like Alderwood mall, Westroads has a P.F. Chang’s restaurant, a Panera Bread bakery and a J.C. Penney store. Like Westroads Mall, Alderwood could just as easily be the scene of a terrible shooting. Alderwood, Everett Mall, Tulalip’s Seattle Premium Outlets — if it could happen in Nebraska, we all know it could happen anywhere.
“We were lucky last summer,” said Julie Tennyson, marketing director at the Everett Mall. Lucky is an understatement, considering the July 20 situation that began with a high-speed police chase involving carjackers.
Late that Friday afternoon, two men in a stolen car ended up at the Everett Mall, where one was arrested. The other gun-wielding man ran through the Everett Mall before stealing a pickup truck. He led police on another wild chase to a Fred Meyer shopping center near Mill Creek, where he ran through the store, gun in hand. He was shot and wounded by police outside the Fred Meyer.
On Nov. 26, Stewart Allan Compher of Everett was sentenced in Snohomish County Superior Court to nearly 17 years in prison after pleading guilty to five felonies in the July incident. His co-defendant, Eric Merlan Johnson II of Seattle, had also pleaded guilty and was sentenced earlier to four years in prison.
Lt. Kathi Lang of the Snohomish County Sheriff’s Office was outside the Everett Mall when the gun-toting suspect ran out. “I am a Christian, and I kept thinking, ‘Please Lord, don’t let anyone get hurt,’ ” Lang said Friday. She was so focused on looking for the suspect, she didn’t notice the reactions of shoppers. “The sense I had was that people were looking and wondering, ‘What’s going on?’ ” Lang said.
To this day, she can’t go to the mall without thinking of it, but that doesn’t keep her away. “I think it’s important that we don’t let these incidents dictate our lives,” she said. “That’s not to say it doesn’t go through my mind. Sure it does, but I’m not going to have my mall taken away from me.”
Tennyson, the Everett Mall spokeswoman, said the mall has more than 20 security people. Stores have security on their phones’ speed dial, she said, and the mall has done emergency planning.
Everett police Lt. Ted Olafson, a police spokesman who works at the department’s South Precinct, near the Everett Mall, was off-duty July 20. He was having something to eat when his media pager started going off. “I hadn’t heard anything from anybody in operations. That tells me they’re too busy to be calling the public information guy,” Olafson said.
When he learned what had happened, he ended up answering reporters’ questions outside the Everett Mall, while sheriff’s spokeswoman Rebecca Hover did the same at the Fred Meyer scene.
Olafson said the situation, while potentially deadly, was very different from the one in Omaha, where 19-year-old Robert Hawkins killed himself after shooting more than a dozen people, killing eight, at the mall’s Von Maur store.
“Our suspects were fleeing from a series of crimes they had already committed. They were not necessarily unstable or unbalanced,” Olafson said. “We were fortunate in the Everett situation that the injury total ended up being so comparatively light. One suspect was wounded by a police bullet, and one or two people were injured in the collisions during the series of chases.
“I remember thinking we were either lucky or good or both on that particular day,” Olafson said.
Lucky. Very lucky, indeed.
Columnist Julie Muhlstein: 425-339-3460 or muhlstein@heraldnet.com.
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