The Mall of America was briefly closed Thursday after multiple shots were fired inside the Bloomington shopping destination.
Bloomington Police Chief Booker Hodges said the shooting was an “isolated incident” involving a dispute between two groups of people. He said police believe only one individual fired the shots and there was no indication anyone was injured.
Hours later, police were still looking for the suspect, who fled on foot. Hodges said officers believed for a time he was holed up in a hotel near the mall, but that didn’t pan out.
Shots rang out shortly after 4 p.m. near or inside a Nike store in the northwest section of the three-level mall, scaring nearby shoppers and creating a chaotic scene captured on cellphone videos that they quickly spread to social networks. Mall security instituted a lockdown and large groups of shoppers crowded into the back rooms of the stores.
“We cannot continue to have this disregard for human life,” Hodges said at a news conference Thursday night at the mall. To the suspect, he said, “Please surrender.”
Kate Rutledge, who had driven from Des Moines, Iowa, to shop at the mall with her husband and four children Thursday morning, said she heard three or four gunshots.
She, her husband and two children were “running like hell,” Rutledge said as they waited outside the Nordstrom department store. The lockdown had just been lifted and they were waiting for their two daughters, who had been elsewhere in the mall and were locked inside another store.
Rutledge said she stayed in touch with her daughters via text throughout the lockdown.
Hodges said investigators believe it all started with a dispute between two groups of people…