Behind the terror in Allen: What bodycam footage shows about mall shooting that killed 8

It was less than four minutes.

From the second an Allen police officer heard distant gunshots at the Allen Premium Outlets while telling some young children they should always wear their seat belts to the moment he engaged and killed the mass shooter, it was less than four minutes. In that time, 33-year-old Nazi sympathizer Mauricio Garcia killed eight people and wounded seven others. The youngest he killed was a 3-year-old boy from Dallas.

Body-camera footage released by police Wednesday shows what happened at the mall that day from the perspective of the officer who killed the man. The footage starts with a routine interaction between the officer and a family. The name of the officer has not been released.

Terror in Allen

Calls to 911 began flooding in just before 3:40 p.m. on May 6.

Operators jumped from one call to the next for more than an hour. After the first couple of calls, they got into a routine of immediately asking two questions when they answered calls: “Are you calling about the shooting at the outlets?” and “Is anybody around you injured?”

Audio from the 911 calls obtained by the Star-Telegram painted a picture of horror, panic and shock at the outlet mall. Parents, spouses and strangers called to beg for help for people who had been shot. Other people called in tips about where the shooter was or a suspicious truck left on the side of the highway near the mall.

“We’re getting help to you as fast as we can,” a dispatcher told one man calling about his wife and two children. “Can you put some pressure on the wounds at all? For anybody?”

One child was already dead. The other was bleeding out, as was his wife.

“I don’t want to lose two more,” he told the dispatcher, crying with desperation clear in his voice. “Get somebody here! ... I need an ambulance, please ... my wife is dying.”

The dispatcher told the man that paramedics were on the way and gave instructions on trying to stop the bleeding.

“They’re getting there as fast as they can,” the dispatcher told the man. “I need you to control the bleeding, OK? Can you put something on the wound?”

Several other people called from the back room of H&M, where they were trying to care for a woman who’d been shot.

“I need you to bear down please,” a dispatcher told the woman at H&M after confirming they were trying to stop the bleeding. “I have to keep taking 911 calls.”

One woman called and calmly described the wounds of another shooting victim outside New Balance, saying he’d been shot in the lower back, she’d stopped the bleeding and the victim was breathing and conscious.

Others called about the security guard, Christian LaCour, who died trying to evacuate people from the mall and a man who was having a heart attack after he was shot at but not hit.

The calls continued long after the shooter was dead. People dialed 911 to ask about loved ones at the mall they hadn’t heard from or to question dispatchers if it was safe to come out of hiding.

But before the first call came in, one officer was already in action tracking down the shooter.

The officer

“Make sure y’all be good, OK?” the officer was saying to the children. “And make sure y’all wear your seat belts when mommy’s driving, OK?”

One of the children asked the officer what kind of weapon he uses. He just chuckled in response before the mother changed the subject back to car safety.

Then the gunshots start.

They’re distant, rapid pops. Everyone pauses. There’s a second where it seems the mother and the officer process what they’re hearing. Around two dozen reverberating, rapid pops of “tsh tsh tsh” sounded like something you might almost be able to convince yourself were fireworks. But then the realization kicks in as the officer starts backing toward his police vehicle and the mother leans down to grab her children by the arm, urging them to hurry as they move to a car.

“One-forty five, I think we’ve got shots fired at the outlet mall,” the officer spat into his radio.

The gunfire stops for a second and the officer leans into the open door of his police vehicle. His movement and his tone of voice are urgent, but they’re steady. Not panicked. It seems like he’s trying to get something out of the vehicle. Not even a moment later he gets a response.

“Three-two, shots fired at the outlet,” a dispatcher acknowledges.

The officer leans back out of his car to survey the situation. He’s in the parking lot in the middle of the outlet, surrounded by buildings. He starts leaning back into the police vehicle, grabbing for his rifle while updating dispatchers, when more shots are heard. This time they’re more metallic, sharper. Louder.

“I got people running,” the officer tells dispatch over the six reports of rifle fire.

He grabs his rifle and he starts running, too. Toward the bone-chilling sound.

“Get going, get going, get moving,” he shouts at mall-goers as he runs toward the buildings.

The officer pulls back the charging handle on his rifle as fellow police announce over the radio that backup is en route. He tells dispatch the shooter is moving farther away from him. As he breaks from a run into a sprint, the officer continues yelling at people to get moving, get to safety.

When the officer reaches the corner of the Ralph Lauren store, he hears four more shots.

“I’m on foot,” the officer tells dispatchers. “I need everybody I got.”

Eight more shots are fired as he nears H&M. Then six more in rapid succession. Someone in the parking lot yells at the officer, telling him where the shooter is. The officer heads in that direction. He sees another person as he walks toward the front entrance to H&M. It’s where the shooting started. There are people on the ground, dead, children among them.

Someone says something to him, unintelligible in the body-camera video.

“A real mass shooter?” the officer responds.

More people tell him which direction the shooter has headed and he assures them that more help is on the way as he keeps moving in the direction he’s told he’ll find the active killer.

The gunshots are still sounding, muffled now and hard to count.

“One-forty-five, I think we’ve got a mass shooter,” the officer tells dispatch. “I got a magazine on the ground.”

Now he raises his rifle, aiming toward the corner and telling someone who walks around it to drop what they have. While the other person is blurred out in the body-camera footage, it appears the person throws their hands in the air and moves along the wall behind the officer, away from the shooter.

The officer reaches the Tommy Hilfiger store and slows down a beat, moving behind a pillar on the outside portion of the walkway for cover and reporting his location to dispatch.

“I don’t know where he’s at,” the officer says.

Three more shots. They’re close now, echoing off the building to his left. He reports them to dispatch.

“I got action still going.”

He begins a brisk push forward, staying as much as he can behind cover. Five more shots. Then seven. Then the officer sees the gunman and he’s engaged.

The officer raises his rifle and squeezes the trigger once, sending a round in the gunman’s direction and pausing before firing two more and moving back to cover. He starts shooting in three-round bursts and then moving back to cover. Some generic, slow, unidentifiable pop song can be just barely heard from the mall’s outdoor speakers between volleys.

In total, the officer fires nine more rounds before radioing back in to dispatch.

“Shots fired by police, I got him down.”

The gunman is down, but he’s not dead. The officer shoots twice more and screams for the gunman to drop the weapon before moving closer. As he nears the shooter’s position, the officer updates dispatch on his position and yells at shoppers still in the area to get away.

The officer warns other police who are now arriving in the area to watch their fire as he moves up on the man.

“Watch your fire, I got him down,” he screams.

Someone asks if the shooter is dead and the officer says he thinks so. He’s not hearing anymore gunshots.

He’s standing just feet away from the gunman now. Another officer tells the first that the shooter is dead. “Got him, bro.”

He rattles off a string of expletives as he walks closer still. Another officer tells the first that he’s got it from there and the officer who killed the gunman walks away, catching his breath, as that pop song keeps playing in the background.

Garcia, with his tattoos of a Swastika and the Nazi SS lightning, was dead and the shooting had stopped, but the effects of the attack he launched were just starting.

A father watched his daughters die. A boy saw his family killed. For the families of the eight people killed that day and the seven others wounded, the horror of May 6 didn’t end when the gunman was killed.

Daniela Mendoza, an 11-year-old in fourth grade, and Sofia Mendoza, an 8-year-old in second grade, were killed. Their mother was shot but survived. Their father was the man who called 911, begging for help.

William Cho, 6, lost his mother Cindy Cho, father Kyu Song Cho and brother James Cho, a 3-year-old boy in preschool who loved elephants.

LaCour, the 20-year-old security guard, evacuated one person from the mall. When he went back in to help more to safety, he was shot and killed.

Aishwarya Thatikonda, an engineer who lived in McKinney, was at the mall shopping for a dress for her upcoming birthday with a friend who was injured in the shooting.

Elio Cumana Rivas, 32, was out with friends at the mall when they split up to go their separate ways after they finished shopping. He lived in Dallas after fleeing violence in Venezuela and seeking asylum in the U.S.

This story was originally published June 28, 2023 at 3:44 PM.

James Hartley

Fort Worth Star-Telegram

James Hartley was a news reporter at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram from 2019 to 2024