There is a lot to break down here so I will do it as efficiently as I can.
On Saturday, as some of you might know, there was a shooting in Allen, TX that resulted in 9 people dead including the gunman. I did not work in the outlets where it happened, but it is 20 minutes away from another big shopping mall where I do work.
My co-worker got a call from her mom and I knew something was wrong by the look on her face. She went to the back, and when I came to see what was wrong, she was hysterical. This was right after what happened in Allen and we were the closest mall to it. We had heard so many different stories from people online saying there was a second shooter or there was a group and rumors of where they were going next.
I calmed her down and we went over our plan if this were to happen where we were. We were to hide in our storage room as it had a heavy metal door and could only be opened from the inside or with a key. I knew where the stairs were in the back halls of the mall and they're also right next to our back door.
We continued working until around 8:30pm, 5 hours after the Allen shooting. We closed at 9pm. We had around 10 people in our store already and the mall was still quite packed because it was Saturday. We heard a bang of some sort and then the entire mall started to run and scream in all directions. We had people coming into our store yelling, asking if there was somewhere we could go.
This all happened in the span of maybe 20 seconds; it happened so fast we didn't have time to grab our phones or our purses. We led as many people as we could to the storage room, but it could only fit maybe 10 people. We were trying to fit 20. We closed the door and one of the men in there with us said he was an off-duty cop from a nearby town and he would help us get out of the mall.
I told him I knew the stairs were right next to us so we all took the chance to go in the back hall and down the stairwell. The doors to the outside were right downstairs, so we were only in the back halls for a minute at most. We left and started running, asking random people if their cars were near. My co-worker and I jumped into this guy's truck and told him to drive away.
The nature of the situation meant that our registers were left uncounted, the gate was left up, and the back room was a mess. We obviously didn't care about that; our only goal was to get the hell out of that mall.
Cut to a few hours later, and the police release a statement saying it was a hoax. Some teenagers thought it would be funny, 5 hours after the shooting in Allen, to pull a prank, throw chairs, and yell “gun”. Traumatizing dozens of people that were at the mall because they thought it was funny.
This infuriated me, not only because it was an extremely upsetting situation but that I worked in a mall with a customer base who thought it would be okay to do this.
The next day, I was off but my co-worker was supposed to go in. We both decided to quit because we were no longer comfortable working in a place with that many people. Before we quit it was just us working there and our general manager. With us gone, he would be running the store by himself, open to close, every day. This made me feel terrible for leaving him, but he didn't go through what we did.
Our general manager is a 24-year-old prick who has gloated about ruining someone's life when he was in high school simply because he didn't get along with him. He is a terrible person who comes in high every day and didn't do anything to help us in the store. The icing on the cake is what he said to my co-worker when she went to get our belongings yesterday.
She had texted him already that she was not going to be working that day, and he proceeded to tell her that one of us needed to come in because it was supposed to be “busy” and we needed to do “counts”. We have never done counts the entire time I have worked there nor were they ever mentioned. I am honestly not even sure what that means.
Now, who in their right mind would think the closest mall to the Allen shooting would be busy the day after. A normal Sunday, sure. Not that Sunday.
My co-worker explained over text why she wasn't comfortable coming in and his response was “Seriously? You have to be kidding.” When she saw him in person, he asked what had happened in the back room after I already explained to him over text. She said “We had to get out of here” and he said “Okay, I was just asking a fucking question. Get your shit and go.” She did, grabbed her store keys, and handed them to my manager, quitting.
After I heard what happened, I quit as well. I have heard the same sentence from so many insensitive people in my life, including my boss, saying “Well, it was just a hoax, so it's all okay, right?”
In a situation where the entire mall is running and screaming after a loud bang saying there's a shooter, I'm not going to stick around and find out if there is one or not. I'm gonna get the hell out of there. It was traumatic and we thought we could lose our lives. There's also the possibility of it happening again for real. I'm not risking my life for a measly $12/hr.