Omaha Gunman Spent Four Years in Treatment
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OMAHA, Neb. — The young man who killed eight people and committed suicide in a shooting rampage at a department store spent four years in a series of treatment centers, group homes, and foster care after threatening to kill his stepmother in 2002.
Finally, in August 2006, social workers, the courts, and his father all agreed: It was time for Robert Hawkins to be released — nine months before he turned 19 and would have been required to leave anyway. The group homes and treatment centers were for youths with substance abuse, mental or behavioral problems.
Altogether, the state spent about $265,000 on Hawkins, officials said. Yesterday, while some of those who knew Hawkins called the massacre Wednesday at a busy Omaha mall unexpected, not everyone was surprised.
“He should have gotten help, but I think he needed someone to help him and needed someone to be there when in the past he’s said he wanted to kill himself,” Karissa Fox, who said she knew Hawkins through a friend, said. “Someone should have listened to him.”
Todd Landry, state director of children and family services, said court records do not show precisely why Hawkins was released. But he said if Hawkins should not have been set free, someone would have raised a red flag.
“It is my opinion, it was not a failure of the system to provide appropriate services,” Mr. Landry said. “If that was an issue, any of the participants in the case would have brought that forward.”
After reviewing surveillance tape, a suicide note and Hawkins’s last conversations with those close to him, police said they don’t know — and may never know — exactly why Hawkins went to the Von Maur store at Westroads Mall and shot more than a dozen people. But he clearly planned ahead, walking through the store, exiting, then returning a few minutes later with a gun concealed in a balled-up sweatshirt he was carrying, authorities said.
Debora Maruca-Kovac, who took Hawkins in because he had no other place to live, told the Omaha World-Herald that the night before the shooting, Hawkins and her sons showed her a semiautomatic rifle. She said she thought the gun looked too old to work.