She heard a bang - a balloon popping, construction noise? But a man who had been standing at the west staircase outside Desert Edge Brewery was now running toward her glass-walled store, yelling about a man with a shotgun and to call 911.

Knudsvig, 22, grabbed the store telephone and began dialing. A couple ran into the store and she motioned them to come behind the countercase of chocolates. The man joined them and so did another couple with a little girl.

Knudsvig, still clutching the scissors she had held when it started, led the six strangers back to the store's utility closet.

"It was instinctual. There was absolutely nowhere to go," said Knudsvig, a nursing student at Westminster College. "What else was I supposed to do?"

She closed the door, enveloping them in an inky darkness because the closet's light was out, and gave them shelter from the chaos below.

Crammed between cases of Minute Maid juice, crates of soda and a yellow cleaning bucket, they waited.

One woman whispered to them, "I don't know if any of you pray, but now would be a good time for it." One man sang ever so softly to quiet his whimpering child.

But they were mostly silent, listening, as gunshots and shouts sounded from beyond the closet door.

"Every single shot sounded the same to us," Knudsvig said. "It sounded like it got a little closer but it never got far away.

"I was praying he was shooting at random things, not people," she said.

And then they heard a burst of rapid fire, which they knew signaled it - whatever it was - was over.

Knudsvig and one of the men emerged from the closet first. Already, police officers were pouring through the mall's second level, ordering people to evacuate the building. She returned to the closet and brought the others out. She hasn't seen any of the strangers since.

"I have no idea who any of them are," Knudsvig said.