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| Howard County police chief William McMahon speaks to reporters at the parking lot of the Mall in Columbia, Md., after a shooting at the mall on Saturday Jan. 25, 2014 in Howard County, Md. Police in Maryland say three people died Saturday in a shooting at a mall in suburban Baltimore, including the presumed gunman. |
COLUMBIA, Md.
(AP) -- The 19-year-old Maryland mall gunman was a skateboarding
enthusiast who took a taxi to the mall, carrying a 12-gauge shotgun he'd
purchased legally a month earlier, plenty of ammunition and some crude
homemade explosives inside a backpack, authorities said.
Darion
Marcus Aguliar entered the Mall in Columbia around 10:15 a.m. Saturday
near Zumiez, a shop that sells skateboarding gear, and went downstairs
to a food court directly below. Less than an hour later, he returned to
the store, dumped the backpack in a dressing room and then started
shooting, police said.
Shoppers fled in a
panic or barricaded themselves behind closed doors and police arrived
within 2 minutes of the first 911 call. They found three people dead,
including Aguilar, who killed himself, police said.
The
shooting has baffled law enforcement and acquaintances of Aguilar, a
quiet, skinny teenager who graduated from high school less than a year
ago and had no criminal record. Police spent Sunday trying to piece
together his motive, but by late afternoon, it remained elusive.
After
Aguilar had fired between six and nine shots, two Zumiez employees were
dead, police said. One victim, Brianna Benlolo, a 21-year-old single
mother, lived half a mile away from Aguilar in the same College Park
neighborhood, but police said they were still trying to determine what,
if any, relationship they had.
Although they lived close to Maryland's
largest university, neither was a student there.
The other employee, Tyler Johnson, didn't know Aguilar and did not socialize with Benlolo outside of work, a relative said.
Tydryn
Scott, 19, said she was Aguilar's lab partner in science class at James
Hubert Black High School and said he hung out with other skaters. She
said she was stung by the news.
"It was really
hurtful, like, wow - someone that I know, someone that I've been in the
presence of more than short amounts of time. I've seen this guy in
action before. Never upset, never sad, just quiet, just chill," Scott
told The Associated Press. "If any other emotion, he was happy,
laughing."
Aguilar graduated in 2013, school officials confirmed.
"There
are a lot of unanswered questions," Howard County Police Chief William
McMahon said at a news conference. Aguilar purchased the shotgun legally
last month at a store in neighboring Montgomery County.
It
took hours to identify the gunman since he was carrying ammunition and a
backpack containing homemade explosives, McMahon said. Officers
searched Aguilar's home Saturday night, recovering more ammunition,
computers and documents, police said.
The home
is a two-story wood-frame house in a middle-income neighborhood called
Hollywood, near the Capital Beltway. No one answered the door Sunday
morning. There was a Christmas wreath on the front door and signs that
read "Beware of Dog."
Aguilar and his mother
rented the home. Sirkka Singleton, who owns the property with her
husband and lives a block away, said they use a property manager to find
tenants and have never met the Aguilars. She declined to say who the
property manager was.
A roommate who answered
the door at Benlolo's home confirmed that she lived there but declined
to comment further. Two police officers went into the home after he
spoke briefly to a couple of reporters.
Residents
described the neighborhood as a mix of owners and renters, including
some University of Maryland students. But university spokeswoman Katie
Lawson said neither the victims nor the gunman attended the school.
A
man who answered the phone at Johnson's residence in Mount Airy,
northwest of Baltimore, said the family had no comment. The victim's
aunt told a local television station that she did not believe her nephew
knew Aguilar.
Sydney Petty, in a statement to WBAL-TV, said she did not believe her nephew had a relationship with Benlolo.
"Tyler
didn't have anything beyond a working relationship with this girl, and
he would have mentioned it if he did, and we're just as confused as
anybody," Petty said.
She said her nephew also worked at a drug rehabilitation center in Mount Airy, for which she served on the board.
Five
other people were hurt in the attack, but only one was hit by gunfire -
a woman who was in the food court downstairs from the store and was hit
in the foot. All were released from hospitals by Saturday evening.
At the time of the shooting, the mall was busy with weekend shoppers and employees.
Police searched the mall with dogs overnight. Stores were to reopen Monday afternoon.
Benlolo's
grandfather, John Feins, said in a telephone interview from Florida
that his granddaughter had a 2-year-old son and that the job at Zumiez
was her first since giving birth to her son.
"She was all excited because she was the manager there," he said.
He
described his daughter's family as a military family that had moved
frequently and had been in Colorado before moving to Maryland about two
years ago. He said his granddaughter was on good terms with her son's
father, and they shared custody.
"I mean, what
can you say?" he said. "You go to work and make a dollar and you got
some idiot coming in and blowing people away."
