We were in an impromptu editors’ meeting when a reporter poked his head in and told us a teenage boy had been shot at Trolley Square. We hurried to the cops-and-courts desk and learned that someone was prowling the mall, firing a gun.
On Feb. 12, 2007, every reporter and photographer available raced for Trolley, some from their homes. The editors started planning as we waited for updates.
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Within six minutes of the first shot fired, the killer was dead, put down by a trio of SWAT officers. Two men, two women and a 15-year-old girl were dead and four others wounded.
The adrenaline of a breaking news story gave way to horror. I kept hearing, and saying, "Oh, my God. Oh, my God."
But with just five hours to deadline, we had work to do. I and other editors and reporters manned the phones, taking notes from breathless reporters and fashioning quick reports for our website. Photos started pouring in, too, and the director of photography fed them online. Designers mocked up pages, then redid them as the evening progressed.
We watched TVs showing police, ambulance and firetruck lights illuminating the night. City buses pulled up to give shelter to witnesses and people who rushed to the mall to find friends and relatives.
Time flew and stood still. At 9 p.m., I started putting all the pieces together for our main story.
By deadline, we didn’t know the names of the victims or the killer.
By the next day, though, we knew that Sulejman Talovic, 18, used a shotgun to kill Jeffrey Walker in the mall parking and to grievously wound his teenage son, A.J. Inside, he shot Vanessa Quinn and Teresa Blair Ellis and Brad Frantz, a couple who died together.
Carolyn Tuft was shopping in Cabin Fever with her daughter, Kirsten Hinckley, when Talovic shot them, left the store, then came back and shot them again. She was with her child when she drew her first breath and when she drew her last.
Shawn Munns and Stacy Hanson also survived; Hanson uses a wheelchair to this day.
Over time, we learned that Talovic and his family had survived the 1993 bloodbath wrought by the Bosnian Serb army in Bosnia-Herzegovina and immigrated to the United States. Sulejman was a little boy at the time, and we can only imagine how death, fear and hunger scarred him.
That child grew into a young man who used a pistol-grip shotgun to terrorize so many people at the mall that night. One witness used his cellphone to record the booming shots and the intervals between them; a TV station played it over and over. It is a sound that cannot be purged from memory.
The year 2007 would turn out to be one of the most eventful, news-wise, that I can remember. In June, a Utah Corrections officer would die in the line of duty; a prison inmate is charged with killing him during an escape attempt. In the summer, wildfires charred hundreds of square miles in central and eastern Utah.
That August, six men were lost in the depths of the Crandall Canyon Mine, and three would-be rescuers died 10 days later in a second implosion.
Five years later, all remain vivid memories, but the terror and toll of the Trolley Square murders stand, sadly, above all.
Peg McEntee is a news columnist. Reach her at pegmcentee@sltrib.com, facebook.com/pegmcentee and Twitter: @pegmcentee.
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