Security boosted at Mall of America following shooting in Nike store
BLOOMINGTON, Minn. -- After a gunman fired inside a crowded Nike store at the Mall of America on Thursday, work is underway to prevent another shooting inside the massive shopping complex.
The Bloomington mall reopened Friday with more security in place. However, the Nike store remains closed as investigators work to find the gunman and another man.
As police piece together what happened, store managers in the mall are doing their own debriefing.
April Kimball, the store manager at Home & Beyond, had gone through a similar experience on New Year's Eve, when a gunman opened fire on the mall's third level, injuring two people, one of them a bystander.
Kimball says that the response from her staff to this most-recent shooting was less chaotic and more like a drill. Her staff, which includes her two daughters, locked the doors, turned off the lights, and took themselves and about a dozen customers into the back room.
Dozens of security cameras cover the ceilings inside the Mall of America. One of them is located near the Nike store. However, police have not yet released the surveillance footage.
Shoppers and store managers at the mall Friday said they noticed extra officers in uniform, as well as some under cover officers, wearing earpieces and carrying two-way radios.
Crowd sizes, the managers estimated, appeared to be slightly below normal.