OMAHA, Neb. — The gunman who killed eight people in a mall shooting “just snapped,” he said in a hand-scrawled suicide note released Friday that combines love for his friends and family with nothing but contempt for his random victims.
“I know everyone will remember me as some sort of monster but please understand that I just don’t want to be a burden on the ones that I care for my entire life,” 19-year-old Robert Hawkins wrote. “I just want to take a few pieces of (expletive) with me.”
Police released the three-page note Friday after The Associated Press made a Freedom of Information Act request.
Hawkins left the note at the Bellevue house where he lived before going to Omaha’s Westroads Mall on Wednesday with an AK-47. He opened fire randomly in the Von Maur store, fatally wounding eight people before taking his own life.
He apologized to his friends in one page of the note, saying, “I’ve been a piece of (expletive) my entire life it seems this is my only option.”
He said his friends would be better off without him, and told them to remember the good times they had.
“Just think tho I’m gonna be (expletive) famous,” he wrote.
He was more apologetic in another page addressed to his family.
“I’m so sorry for what I’ve put you through I never meant to hurt all of you so much and I don’t blame any one of you for disowning me,” he wrote.
“I’ve just snapped I can’t take this meaningless existence anymore I’ve been a constant disappointment and that trend would have only continued.”
He added, “I love you mommy. I love you dad,” and expressed love for several other people.
The third page was his will: “I’m giving my car back to my mom and my friends can have whatever else I leave behind.”
Hawkins became a ward of the state and spent four years in a series of treatment centers, group homes and foster care after threatening to kill his stepmother in 2002. The facilities were for youths with substance abuse, mental or behavioral problems.
Acquaintances said that Hawkins was a drug user and had a history of depression. In 2005 and 2006, according to court records, he underwent psychiatric evaluations.
About an hour before Wednesday’s shootings, Hawkins called Debora Maruca-Kovac, a woman who had taken him into her home, and told her he had written the suicide note, Maruca-Kovac said.
The shoppers killed were Gary Scharf, 48, of Lincoln, and John McDonald, 65, of Council Bluffs, Iowa. The employees killed were Angie Schuster, 36; Maggie Webb, 24; Janet Jorgensen, 67; Diane Trent, 53; Gary Joy, 56; and Beverly Flynn, 47, all of Omaha.
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