An Allen resident found himself stuck in the back of a shoe store with roughly a dozen people at the Allen Premium Outlets shopping center in the immediate aftermath of last Saturday’s mass shooting.
Nick Spinosa, 25, set out to buy a new pair of shoes that day and arrived around 3:45 p.m. He told The Dallas Express he pulled into the main entrance of the shopping center and parked near the Journeys store, which was just on the other side of the parking lot from the H&M store.
As previously reported by The Dallas Express, a gunman got out of his vehicle in the vicinity of H&M and opened fire on bystanders with a semiautomatic rifle. An Allen police officer was already at the scene on an unrelated call and heard the shots at 3:36 p.m. The officer located the gunman and killed him, ending the massacre that left eight innocent people dead and seriously injured several others.
When Spinosa arrived, he did not notice anything unusual other than a single police siren in the area.
“I didn’t really think anything of it. It was a hot day … so someone probably passed out or something. I didn’t think twice about it,” Spinosa told The Dallas Express.
He tried entering a couple of stores, first Clarks and then another, but they were both locked. He then tried Journeys, which he found was also locked.
“Then someone came rushing to the door. It was a woman, maybe mid-twenties or so. She unlocked the door and opened it. … She said, ‘there’s an active shooter … do you want to come in?’ And I said yes,” Spinosa said.
The woman led him toward the back of the store, where about 12 to 15 people were crowded away from the window walls that lined the storefront, he said.
“Some people in the store mentioned that they had seen smoke coming off of the guy’s gun right after the shots were fired because Journeys does directly overlook H&M,” Spinosa said.
He and the others stayed in the back of the store for roughly an hour and a half. One of the employees there told him she had been trying to contact mall security, but it was difficult to get in touch with anyone.
As previously reported by The Dallas Express, one of the security guards working there, Christian LaCour, had been killed by the shooter.
“There were a lot of potential stories that were going around in the crowd. No one really knew for sure what had happened or how many shooters there were or what the situation was,” Spinosa said.
Eventually, he and the others there saw a growing police presence amassing outside in the parking lot.
“They went around store to store and then they evacuated us. We all had to walk with our hands up, probably about a quarter mile to this big open area that was secured with a lot of police and even helicopters too,” Spinosa said.
Police informed the crowd that it was safe to leave but that they could not take their vehicles yet, so Spinosa took an Uber home.
He had only moved to Allen from New York about two years ago, and Saturday’s events were a shock.
“No one ever thinks that an active shooter situation will be near you, especially in Texas. I mean, I know Allen as a super safe city, so it was definitely shocking,” Spinosa said.
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