PALM BEACH GARDENS, Fla. — In an instant, a shopping trip at the Palm Beach Gardens Mall turned into a moment of fear for one man who was there Wednesday with his family.
“All of a sudden, four or five shots went off as we were leaving Banana Republic,” he said, preferring to stay anonymous. “The immediate reaction was to get down and fall out of harm’s way.”
After that, he said, he and his wife and their son then retreated inside the store to a back room and hallway, but not before he noticed someone unusual coming up the escalator.
“As I look up there’s a man calmly exiting the escalator and he looks right at me and I’m right there and he just smiles and has his hand in his pocket,” he said, not knowing if that was the person who may have fired a gun.
No one at the time was aware the shooting was not an active shooter event, but rather a "targeted shooting" according to police. The uncertainty led to a panic-stricken situation, with shoppers rushing to safety—ranging from running for exits, to taking cover and hunkering down in fitting rooms.
“When you have a scenario, when you’re in a public place, the place to go is not necessarily straight down the middle of the mall,” Tim Miller of Lionheart International, a personal safety in West Palm Beach, said.
Miller said stores are typically safe spots, since they have back exits and identifying exits is a big recommendation he likes to give people.
“One of the interesting things in the research we’ve done is, for those that identify a second or third exit option in a mass panic," Miller said, "their chance of survival goes up 90%.”