How the Columbia mall mass shooting unfolded over Easter weekend (2024)

COLUMBIA— Crowds of shoppers, dominated by young people and families, strolled along the corridors of the popular Columbiana Mall on a rainy Saturday before Easter.

By lunchtime, tables were scarce in the large, high-ceiling food court as diners huddled over their trays of food whilea long line of diners waited to order at the Chick-fil-A. Down the hall, children waited to have their photo taken with the Easter Bunny, and shoppers crowded around vendors selling jewelry and phone cases lined the mall’s main artery.

Less than two hours later, the mall turned into chaos.

Shots rang out. Shoppers scurried for safety amid the sound of shattering glass.

Mothers dove to cover strollers with their babies. Fathers turned their backs to the gunfire and shielded their children.

Employees helped shoppers barricade themselves inside stores. People were knocked down and trampled in the panic to escape.

And multiple shoppers lay bleeding on the tiled mall floor from gunshot wounds after more than dozen bullets were fired.

Soon dozens of police officers would arrive from three counties, shutting down the mall as well as roads all along Columbia's busiest retail district.

The tally was stark: nine shot and six injured as shoppers fled.

No one died, but the shootout inside Columbiana Centre, blamed on another shooting from four years ago, would make international headlines.

The spray of gunfire in a crowded mall was shocking inside a place that most would consider safe from such danger.

Pushing, shoving, screaming

Justin Thornton and his family had chosen the mall for a shopping outing April 16 with a purpose. His wife, Angela, wanted clothes appropriate for a new job she will start April 25.

Angela pushed their 4-year-old daughter in a jogging stroller browsing Francesca’s, women’s boutique, while Justin and their son, Cayden, waited just outside the door.

The 11-year-old boy asked to visit the Journeys Kidz shoe store just across the main mall corridor. His father could see inside the store from where he stood, so he agreed while he continued to wait outside Francesca’s.

The first warning sign Thornton remembers was a woman calling out loudly.

The northeast Columbia resident couldn’t make out the woman's words, but he believes they were in response to seeing guns drawn.

As Thornton heard the woman shout, the popping of gunshots rang clear just down the corridor from where stood.

The 34-year-old father didn’t see the shots being fired, but prosecutors later said the mall cameras did.

Old foes meet in the mall

Details of what happened inside the mall when the shooting was disclosed by prosecutors and defense attorneys during bond hearings last week.

Marcus Robinson and Amari Smith arrived at Columbiana together on April 16.

Smith is tall, a former basketball player at Lower Richland High School listed at 6-foot-7 on a team roster. The 21-year-old entered the mall wearing the same hooded sweatshirt and ski mask he could be seen wearing in social media photos in which he brandished a handgun with an extended magazine, prosecutors would say later.

Robinson, 20, is a Columbia native who graduated from A.C. Flora in 2018 and works for a national shipping company.

At about 2 p.m., Jewayne Price, 22, walked along one side of the mall’s main corridor near the food court in front of The Gap store. Price had been the subject of social media threats from Robinson and others stemming from the death of 17-year-old Amon Rice in 2018 in a large shootout in a church parking lot. Price was among more than a dozen people charged in Rice's death before a grand jury failed to find cause to indict him.

At the mall, Robinson and Smith approached Price from the other side. The men saw each other, and each drew a gun at about the same time as dozens of shoppers walked alongside those who were suddenly armed.

A vendor’s kiosk was between Robinson and Price as they exchanged fire. Smith was standing somewhere nearby and away from Robinson. As Price and Smith fired at each other, a person between them hit the ground to take cover.

The owner of an ice cream parlor in the food court said he heard 12-13 shots in rapid succession, roughly the same number prosecutors mentioned in court.

Shoppers, once clustered together walking from store to store, scattered frantically in the hail of gunfire.

'Where's my son?'

Not everyone was able to escape.

A bullet struck a 73-year-old woman walking near the shooters, and she remained hospitalized longer than the other nine victims with an injury that will change the remaining course of her life, authorities said.

A bullet struck a 16-year-old girl in the back, entering an inch from her spine. Another bullet hit a pregnant woman.

A woman found her husband shot in the thigh after he had called out for her, and the couple ran with others to find cover.

More were hurt as shoppers tried to escape the bullets. A father fleeing with a child in a stroller knocked over a young woman, who bashed her head and face on the hard floor.

Thornton needed a second to collect his thoughts as he heard the shots, his family in separate places. He turned to look in Francesca’s clothing store to see that his wife and daughter were safe and then sprinted into the Journeys Kidz store to find 11-year-old Cayden.

“My son, where’s my son?” Thornton shouted.

An employee pointed beyond the register, where an open doorway led to a hall to the stock room. Thornton found his son in a hallway, running toward an emergency exit. The father yelled for him to stop and asked him to sit in a chair at the back of the store and not move.

Store employees had already pulled down the metal chain-like barrier to close the store to the outside as Thornton looked up and down the mall corridor to survey the scene.

An older woman was on the ground and appeared to have been shot in the backside, a trail of blood led to where a younger woman was being tended to by multiple people, as if she had tried to run before collapsing on the ground, Thornton said.

He was struck by the calmness of the women after being shot.

Shattered glass sprinkled the tile floor, and trash cans had been overturned by people fleeing.

Bayrone Billups told a television station that he had been celebrating his birthday with his wife when the shots rang out, and that people began streaming in every direction looking for an exit.

“I just grabbed her by the arm, and we started running, falling all over the place. Everybody was falling and running over top of each other— pushing, shoving, screaming,” Billups told WACH.

Thonrton returned to his son, who was crying in the chair.

The father said it would be OK, and convinced a Journeys employee to open the gate far enough for father and son to slip under and run to Francesca’s so they could reunite with the rest of the family.

“Don’t look at anything, look straight ahead and run as fast as you can when I tell you to,” Thornton told his son.

Francesca’s was empty when the father and son sprinted through the door. Thornton reached his wife by phone, and an employee unlocked a door at the back of the store and led the father and son to where the rest of the family was huddled with about 10 other people in a small store bathroom.

The store was one of several in the mall without a back exit to the outside. The group waited for police to find them.

Arriving to chaos

Police found a mall in pandemonium.

Harbison Boulevard, already choked with the usual heavy Saturday traffic, had been throttled with cars of people escaping the mall as police cruisers from a 40-mile radius ranging from the Newberry County Sheriff to the FBI screamed toward the chaos, sirens wailing in the afternoon heat.

Some shoppers and store employees milled about the parking lot, hiding behind their cars with a watchful eye toward mall entrances.

Others walked away from the mall, sharing details with others of what they had seen and wondering how a calm Saturday afternoon had dissolved into a random act of violence. A mall security guard opined aloud whether the mall would open again that day. It would not reopen for two more days.

At the Circle K gas station across from the mall, people who had left shared news of what happened with store clerks and anyone who asked, speculating on what could still be happening behind the wall of police that was building outside the mall entrances.

Much of it, in the immediate fog of the incident, would prove to be inaccurate. Counts varied on the number of people shot. Some speculated there was a lone gunman, and that they were still barricaded in the mall. Nobody knew if anyone had been killed, or a possible motive.

Candice Kingsmore, at the mall to celebrate her son's birthday, streamed live video on Facebook to let friends and loved ones know she and her family were OK.

Inside the mall, teams of heavily armed officers with riot shields worked store-by-store to clear the massive property with more than 100 shops.

The Thorntons and others who had been locked in the one-person bathroom in Francesca’s for more than half an hour were finally escorted to an exit by a team of police.

Once outside, Justin and Angela waited another half an hour before walking around the mall to where their car was parked outside the food court. They had heard that’s where one of the suspects were found, and didn’t know how they would get to their car.

Once they got to the vehicle, they found a Columbia Police SUV blocking them in.

In the back seat, Price was being held in handcuffs, wearing camouflage pants, a black shirt and black and white shoes.

Price’s attorney, Todd Rutherford, would later tell a judge that Price had called his family from the mall, who then called police and that he turned himself in on site.

Lasting effects

In the parking lot of a nearby Mexican restaurant, reporters awaited any news they could get under clear skies and a glaring sun. Police bearing long guns filtered in and out of a nearby command center.

Columbia Mayor Daniel Rickenmann soon arrived at the scene along with City Councilwoman Aditi Bussells.

Columbia Police Chief Skip Holbrook, who had been home with family when the call of an active-shooter went out, finally exited a temporary tent set up as a command post flanked by federal agents and delivered facts the public had been waiting to hear.

Price was arrested on April 16. Robinson turned himself in two days later, and Smith did the same on April 21.

Three men were ultimately arrested and jailed on attempted murder and felony assault charges in what authorities said was a dispute going back several years. All three remain in Lexington County jail without bond.

At bond hearings for the suspected shooters, victims watched from the back.

A woman wearing a bright floral print dress had a bandage wrapped around a gunshot wound to her ankle.

A husband who had been shot in the leg sat in the first row to one side with his wife, a pair of crutches leaned against the wall.

A young woman with a bandage over her eye from being knocked to the floor described nightmares she had already experienced, waking to gunfire rattling in her dreams.

“I will flinch at heavy rain or hail on a roof, sudden yelling, loud popping sounds and a list of things that I will keep discovering as they go through my life and deal with what happened,” said the woman, who like other victims was not identified in court.

The night of the shooting, the 4-year-old Charlotte Thornton entered Justin and Angela Thornton’s room to wake her mother.

The girl said she had a bad dream, that she was scared and needed to hide.

Angela Thornton tucked Charlotte back in her toddler bed and slept the rest of the night on her daughter’s floor.

Nick Reynolds contributed from Columbia.