I could not hear anything except for people screaming “gun! ” My face went numb and it felt like my throat was being choked from my inability to speak. My vision suddenly became spotty and I was not able to see straight. All the sounds around me went mute as I scoured every angle around me to look for this gun being screamed about from the dozens of voices in the crowd. “Oh my god Lauren! What do we do? What is happening? ” My coworker asked me in a panic. I finally had the ability to process my thoughts and answer, “get down right now, you’re fine, don’t worry. ” Llied. I had no clue if she would be fine. I was not fine myself.
I woke up that Saturday morning and thought I was just going to my next work shift at work. I ended up huddled in the corner of my kiosk with a seventeen-year-old girl crying in my arms. It all began with a loud bang. I was working a shift at the Mrs. Fields kiosk at Twelve Oaks mall this past summer, which has been a normality for me for the past five years. The chaos started with the smash-and-grab heist that occurred in a jewelry store. Immediately, I felt the stir of a panic attack beginning in my system. In a matter of seconds, I felt a cold, tingly sensation running through my veins. I just wanted to run from my body.
My heart was racing. I had a fear of losing control, the fear of dying, and the fear of going crazy all in the matter of what was only a couple seconds but felt like days. Walls were closing in on me as my knees got weak and fell to the floor. I felt trapped. “Lauren, I am so scared. I want to go home,” my co-worker kept repeating. Her tears made me feel like I had to help her. She was not only my co-worker, but also someone that I did not want to see get hurt. My fear started to lessen as I started to feel guilt instead. This is because my young co-worker, Isabella, was not supposed to work at all that Saturday afternoon.
She requested the day off, and as the supervisor I denied her wish because I needed an extra employee to help out on that busy day. Therefore, if anything had happened to her it would have been my fault. The guilt rushing over me caused me to come out of my shock and panic. My stance of fear and helplessness was still there, but somehow I had the power to think rationally and realize that there were no gunshots being fired. The sounds in the crowd were screams and heavy pounds to the floor from people running, but I had heard no gunshots. I gathered myself and stood up to witness the trauma occurring all around me.
I felt like I was a piece of grass in the ground standing in the middle of a stampede of cattle. “Hurry! Run! We need to get out of here! ” said a mother gripping her young child’s hand to my left. “Shooter! Shooter! ” said a panicked trying to warn the crowd. “They have a gun! ” said a voice to my left. They did not, there was not, and no they did not. Since Tappers, the jewelry store involved in the burglary, is located right above Mrs. Fields, I had full view of the action. I had the ability to view what was happening around me compared to what people believed from others.
This advantage saved me from having a panic attack. There were a total of three young men involved in the raid. Right after the first loud bang that had set in the commotion from a hammer to the glass full of jewelry, the first crook ran to an exit towards Lord & Taylor, a department store that leads outside the quickest. The second was pushed into a glass door by the Tapper’s security guard and what happened next was one of the hardest things I had to ever witness. The resisting thief punched the guard across the face causing his grip to loosen. The guard fell backwards a few feet. Another punch was initiated.
The guard was now on his knees completely vulnerable; however, the thief felt the need to prove his strength and continue to kick him in the stomach. Working in the same place for five years straight gave me time to develop connections to my regular customers, which were mostly mall employees. These connections were more than just small talk at the register, but I cared for these people. The guard was not only was a regular customer of mine, but also a husband, and a father to his own family. He came to Mrs. Field’s almost every shift I had and was truly a genuine, good-hearted man.
All of the memories I had of him flashed through my eyes faster than the speed of light. He always asked me how schooling was, and what I wanted to be in the future. But the reason I respected him so much was that he always reminded me that education is the one thing that nobody can take away from me and I had the capability to achieve anything I desired. Seeing one of the motivating figures in my life get tortured caused my heart to fall into my stomach. My jaw dropped and my hands fell onto my chest in disbelief that this was actually happening to such an innocent man right before me.
The mall security guards did not run to him in time to prevent this. The security was just as confused as everyone else was and did everything wrong. They did not expect something so random and scary to happen and were not as prepared for disaster as they thought. Fortunately, the guard was okay and stood up with the help of others a few minutes after the second man escaped. That was more important for me to know before I even thought to look at where the second man found an exit. Finally, I watched the third man run away from the scene as he ran down the escalator through the frightened crowd right past me.
He was about a foot away from my kiosk. He was looking straight ahead as | looked into his face. His eyes were flushed with fear, just as everyone else around him, and I noticed he had no weapons on him and no intention to hurt anyone. He wanted to get out of there just as bad as everyone else. After all the criminals were unseen, I grabbed onto Isabella and dragged her to the back of the store with me. I took her coat and purse and placed them on her while I demanded her to call her family to reassure them she was safe and on her way home.
Her red puffy eyes looked at me in horror and I promised her she was going to be fine as long as she calms down and drives carefully. I would not have let her go if I had not known for a fact she was going to be okay, just like I knew everyone else in the mall would be as well. A glass door toppling to the floor, knocked over by thieves who had smashed a glass display inside the jewelry store was mistaken for gunfire. This led to rumors that spread at blazing speed in person and on social media, setting off a panic that shut down the mall for the rest of the night.
Although the symptoms of a panic attack began in my body, I was competent enough to use my sensible thinking and realize I was safe. If this were not the case, I would have easily started to hyperventilate, throw up, and possibly even pass out. It was determined hours later that no one had fired a gun in the mall. Either the shattering glass display case or the slamming glass door must have sounded like gunfire to some. Misinformation then spread like wildfire inside the mall and on social media, which led people to leave in herds and clogged access for police.
The robbery also set into motion a series of mall-activated events: Mall security and employees went into lockdown mode in which employees and customers stayed put in the stores they were shopping in while officials responded. After a lockdown, an orderly evacuation began. However, this lockdown occurred four hours after the actual robbery. I was forced by security to leave my kiosk because it is open and there are no protective walls and ordered to stay inside T-Mobile, which is located a minute away from my post. I walked calmly, as I saw the faces of the crowd run into stores for hiding.
I felt a sense of guilt that these people truly believed they were in danger. Of course people are not going to stop to see what everyone else is running from because the most logical thing to do is run with they suspect danger. The Millennium Bug, or more commonly known as the Y2K scare was just like this event due to the fact that both were heavily exaggerated and scared innocent people for nothing. The Y2K scare was the fear that all data would be lost because years were put into computer systems as two digits instead of four digits.
People thought that all data would be erased and everything would restart at the year “00”. If this happened, then all computers would be using an incorrect date and therefore, fail to operate. However, this anticipated disaster never occurred. When all the clocks struck midnight on December 31st, 1999, computers had little to no problems. People did not know that computers were actually more intelligent then they thought, and would be able to automatically know that the year goes up by one number. To this day, people argue that the whole thing was dramatically exaggerated and blown way out of proportion.
The scare estimated to cost about $300-$600 billon dollars, so I would consider their argument completely valid (The Editors of Encyclop? dia Britannica). This event ties into my essay because this is exactly how people were acting during the robbery of Twelve Oaks mall. Most people still think that the jewelry heist that happened late October of 2016 was a traumatic experience. However, I had a full on experience of everything that happened, from the first punch to the last people leaving the mall. People were acting like it would be the last day they would wake up.
I witnessed countless amounts of people screaming and holding hands running for their lives out of this mall. I stood at the kiosk I work at watching these entire people freak out for nothing. Later on, police offers scoured the mall with huge guns. Not only were the people inside of the mall terrified, but also this story ending up on the news and on the radio minutes later calling this a mass shooting. One person tweeted that there one person was dead and two were wounded, when in fact there was not one report of injury.
I had to pick up a dozen phone calls from family members to reassure them that I was safe. The whole day was blown out of proportion. Since I am an insider from this story, I can tell you straight forward that the only events that occurred on this day was a hammer breaking the glass, a criminal beating up the robber against the wall, and three men running away from the scene. The sounds of this chaos initiated loud sounds that civilians mistook for gunshots. It was reported the next day that no guns were present on the scene. There was never an active shooter, let alone a gun to begin with.
In the heat of the moment and with social media picking up the misinformation about the robbery, a smash-and-grab at a mall jewelry store launched the dash for safety. What was unfolding was an incomplete record of what was happening and the constant interaction of social media. What we are lacking is the skill to immediately fact check. We tend to go with information as it is shared and we tend to overreact to fear and any information of something that is fearful. If there had not been any confusion around there being a possible shooter or not, then the mall would have been evacuated instead of locked down for four hours.
Days later I spoke to a friend who is also a security guard at the mall that showed up late to the scene and saw did not see one criminal. His response to all my questions and concerns was one simple answer, “Don’t worry Lauren we are taking the mistakes we learned on Saturday and using what we learned to better handle future crisis. ” “I hope so. ” I replied concerned. I thought to myself if we learned anything from history; it is that people will always tend to exaggerate an event to the best of its ability. Instead of trying to tell a good story, people should learn it is better to go straight to the truth for the sake of innocent lives.
