The incident was captured in panicked 911 calls made by shoppers, with operators directing callers to take cover and stay safe.
A deadly shooting massacre occurred at an outlet mall in Allen, Texas, resulting in eight deaths and several wounded victims
Witnesses said a gunman dressed in tactical gear and armed with an AR-15-style weapon was moving through Allen Premium Outlets, having first fired shots in the mall’s parking lot near an H&M store. Stores in the mall became callers’ markers for locating gunshot victims and the whereabouts of the shooter.
The gunman, identified as 33-year-old Mauricio Garcia, was found wearing a patch with “RWDS” on it after being shot by an Allen officer. The insignia may stand for “Right Wing Death Squad,” and Garcia left online posts that appeared to show support for Nazism and obsession over guns and prior mass shootings. In the weeks leading up to the shooting, Garcia posted a screenshot from Google Maps showing when the mall was busiest and a photo of the mall with writings supporting Nazi ideology.
The shooting marked at least the 202nd mass shooting the US had suffered in 2023, according to the Gun Violence Archive. The number has since risen to at least 225, with a mass shooting defined as those in which four or more people are shot, excluding the shooter.
The incident has led to several activist groups calling for local and federal authorities to investigate whether the shooting was a hate crime
Although the motive behind the shooting has not been determined, officials said that it did not appear the gunman was targeting people based on their ethnicity during the attack. The victims of the shooting were Cho Kyu Song, 37, his wife Kang Shin Young, 35, and their 3-year-old son James, elementary school students and sisters Daniela and Sofia Mendoza, 20-year-old mall security guard Christian LaCour, Aishwarya Thatikonda, and Elio Cumana-Rivas, 32.
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