"It couldn't happen here" no longer true

I took a late lunch Wednesday, and just before 2 p.m. I felt my phone buzzing in my pocket. It was a text message from a local TV station and it said the following:

"Shooting at Westroads Mall -- complete coverage . . ."

Considering the number of shootings that have taken place in Omaha during 2007 (somewhere in the neighborhood of 89,274, although I've lost count), this -- in my opinion -- was not news. I deleted the message and headed back up to the office to resume afternoon duties.

A few minutes later, I get a text message from my sister in Norfolk:

"Is everybody in Omaha all right?"

A couple of minutes after that, another message from the TV station:

"Two dead in mall shooting at Westroads . . ."

Soon after, there is a buzz going around the New Business division at Pacific Life -- there is a gunman on the loose inside the Von Maur store.

Oh my God, I thought to myself . . . it's not a shooting, it's a freaking massacre.

Different reports were buzzing on any number of cell phones throughout the office. Some said five were dead, others had it at two. Then it was 14 shot and nine dead.

And, all of a sudden, the phrase "That could never happen here" wasn't true anymore -- senseless, horrible mass violence had found its way into the Heartland of America.

Before the afternoon was over, I was communicating with my sister, ex-wife and daughter via text messaging. I was sneaking a peek on the Internet at the office to see if any information was available. Nobody really knew what to say at that point, because some people had connections with people working or shopping at Westroads Mall that day.

This morning, one co-worker arrived late with a look on his face that needed no explanation. Before coming to work, he had to pick up a friend at the airport who flew in due to a death in the family -- one of the victims at Von Maur. Another talked of her plans to interview the day of the shooting for a job a friend had lined up for her at a store not far away from Von Maur. That, obviously, is on hold for a while.

Wednesday night, I went to my Gretna Poker League game at Jackson's Pub and sat down to a table that had one empty seat. The seat was eventually filled by a young man who, not less than an hour earlier, was still locked down in a store near Von Maur. He had met his mother, sister and niece at Von Maur to help pick out some Christmas presents for his brother-in-law. When he heard the shots two floors above him, he grabbed his niece, turned to his mother and sister and said, "Get the hell out of here, somebody's shooting." How he was able to play cards after experiencing what he went through just hours earlier is beyond my comprehension.

In the end, a mentally whacked-out 19-year-old from Bellevue was found to be the one who created the mayhem and murder in the west Omaha mall. He had lost a job at McDonald's earlier that day, wrote three suicide notes saying he was "going to be famous," took an AK-47 that he had stolen from his stepfather, drove across town and unleashed the bloodiest mass killing in our state's history.

There is no explanation for something like this. All the local media have been tripping over themselves trying to make sense of the senseless, bringing logic to a place where it doesn't fit. Eight innocent civilians who were doing nothing more than living their day-to-day lives were gunned down in cold blood by a horrible individual who wanted to, in his own words, "go out in style."

Why, then, did he have to take so many innocent lives with him? Why did he drive all the way across town to a mall he would -- those who knew him claim -- otherwise never set foot in? Why did he do this? They're all questions we will probably never get answers to.

We've seen situations like this before, and until yesterday we had somehow been able to find a certain peace in knowing that something like that would never happen in Nebraska.

The shootings at the school in Columbine, Colo., hit close to home -- but not in Nebraska.

The horrible one-man rampage at Virginia Tech last year was big news -- but that would never happen here in Nebraska.

Mall shootings in Kansas City, Georgia and Utah were terrible and tragic -- but we'll never see that in Nebraska.

Right?

Yesterday -- it DID happen in Nebraska. And whatever lingering sense of utopia we had about our home and our state are no longer available for us to fall back on when senseless tragedy strikes elsewhere in our world.

The fact that it happened at all is something that will take some time for us to recover from. That it happened less than three weeks before Christmas is something that will be extremely hard for the families of those whose lives were forever touched by this horrible incident. The holidays will never be the same for them because of the outrageous, cold-blooded act of an extremely disturbed young man.

We will carry on as Nebraskans, one way or another. This is still a great place to live, work and love.

But Wednesday's events have shown us that, as great a place as our little corner of the world is, the unthinkable can happen -- HAS happened -- right here. And knowing that now makes the world a much different place for us to live in.