“I’m shit, but now I’m going to be famous,” Robert Hawkins wrote in a note he left before committing suicide last Wednesday after killing eight people in a shopping center in Nebraska (USA). Those words defined his state. .
He was 19 years old at the time and had not finished high school. According to the local newspaper, the Omaha World-Herald, he has been unemployed, has no girlfriend and considers himself worthless.
Police said the brutal shooting appeared to be part of a premeditated suicide. Hawkins shot himself with an SKK assault rifle after causing a massacre at Omaha’s Westroads Mall, killing five women and three men and wounding five others.
The young man has lived since last year with the family of a friend, also a teenager. His mother, Debora Maruca, said the boy had shown them his Russian semi-automatic rifle the night before the shooting, but she thought he was too old to use it.
According to the Omaha World-Herald, Hawkins’s parents divorced when he was three years old and he spent time in foster care. In 2006, he was a high school dropout commended for breaking the law and fired from a fast food restaurant for allegedly stealing $17.
Still, Debora Maruca said that he seemed to be trying to put his life in order. When he heard about the shooting at the mall, he told the Omaha World-Herald, he thought, “My God, I hope it wasn’t Robbie.” willpower.
Some of the deceased were lining up to have their new Christmas presents packed. “It was horrible, it was horrible,” recalled a woman who hid behind a coat hanger at local television station KETV.
The shooting in Nebraska was the latest in a series of mass murders that have shocked Americans in a country where gun ownership is commonplace and the right to own one is a highly controversial constitutional right. This is currently on the agenda. Supreme Court.
“He wanted to walk away like a star,” said Andrew Bigler, who identified himself as a friend of Hawkins. “His life was hard for him, but he was a good boy.”
