“I’m shit, but now I’m going to be famous,” Robert Hawkins wrote in a note left before committing suicide last Wednesday after killing eight people in a Nebraska shopping mall. Those words summed up his situation.
He was 19 years old and had not completed high school at the time. According to the Omaha World-Herald, he has been unemployed, has no partner, and believes he is useless.
The savage gunshot appeared to be part of a deliberate suicide, according to police. Hawkins shot himself with an SKK assault rifle after killing five ladies and three men and injuring five more at Omaha’s Westroads Mall.
Since last year, the young man has been living with the family of a buddy, also a teenager. Debora Maruca, the boy’s mother, said he showed them his Russian semi-automatic gun the night before the shooting, but she thought he was too old to use it.
Hawkins’ parents split when he was three years old, and he spent time in foster care, according to the Omaha World-Herald. He was a high school dropout who was praised for breaching the law and sacked from a fast-food restaurant for allegedly stealing $17 in 2006.
Nonetheless, Debora Maruca stated that he appeared to be attempting to organize his life. When he heard about the mall shooting, he told the Omaha World-Herald, he thought, “My God, I hope it wasn’t Robbie.”
Some of the deceased were waiting in line to get their new Christmas gifts wrapped. “It was horrible, it was horrible,” a woman who sheltered beneath a coat hanger at KETV, a local television station, recounted.
The Nebraska killing was the latest in a string of mass murders that have stunned Americans in a country where gun ownership is popular and the right to own one is a contentious constitutional right. This is currently on the schedule. The Supreme Court.
“He wanted to walk away like a star,” claimed Andrew Bigler, identifying himself as Hawkins’ friend. “His life was hard for him, but he was a good boy.”