Paramus, NJ - A person with a gun opened fire on Monday evening in a massive New Jersey shopping mall shortly before closing time, leading police to evacuate the mall and search for the shooter, a county official said.
Bergen County spokeswoman Jeanne Baratta told The Associated
Press that a call went out that shots were had been fired at the Garden State
Plaza Mall shortly before the facility’s 9:30 p.m. closing time. She said
authorities found one bullet casing.
Hundreds of law enforcement officers converged on a mall,
which was put on lockdown. New Jersey State Police landed a helicopter in the
parking lot of the 2.2-million square foot facility, one of the state’s largest
and most popular shopping malls.
Baratta said SWAT teams and police with K-9 units were going
through the mall and working to evacuate anyone who is still in there. As of
11:30 p.m., authorities believed there were still people in the mall, she said.
Jessica Stigliano, 21, of Richfield, told the AP that she
was sitting in the mall’s food court when she saw people running and yelling
“shots were fired.”
Stigliano said she also began running. She said at the time
she was thinking, “Not many people run for their life, but that’s what I’m
doing right now.”
She did not see a shooter. “It was scary to think that you
could be that close to something like that,” Stigliano said.
A manager at Chili’s at Garden State Plaza told the AP they
were on lockdown and could not leave. She said a manager at Nordstrom ran over
to use the phone saying there had been a shooting. She did not say if the
Nordstrom manager witnessed it.
Althea Brown, 26, of Paterson told NorthJersey.com she was
in a clothing store when she saw a man walk by and then heard three shots
followed by two more. She said he appeared to be wearing body armor and was
wearing a helmet with the visor pulled up.
Several frightened customers sent tweets saying they were
escorted from the mall by armed state troopers. One woman wrote that she ran
from the mall “screaming.”
The family of Rabbi
Shmuley Boteach, popularly dubbed “America’s Rabbi,” were among those trapped
in a New Jersey mall after multiple shots were fired shortly before closing
time Monday.
In a lengthy Facebook post he titled “My Family’s Terror at
the NJ Garden State Mall,” Boteach shared Monday night’s dramatic events as an
eye-witness, and perhaps a key player in mobilizing NJ police.
As Boteach and the youngest three of his nine children
entered the Best Buy electronics store to collect his wife and 15-year-old
daughter, they were met with panicked, fleeing customers shouting, “Shooter.
Run!”
Boteach described how he and the three children turned
around and ran to the parking lot where he attempted to make contact with his
wife.
“There is no need to think. I am not in shock but clear-headed.
There have been so many shootings lately in America that I know exactly what
this is,” Boteach wrote.
After several tense moments the rabbi made contact with his
wife and learned his family is in hiding. He called 911 emergency response
which advised him to tell his wife to continue hiding and not come out.
It is at this point that Boteach the famous “macher” began
to work his contacts, starting with the owner of the mall who alerted the head
of security of the family’s location.
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