Chaos Does Exist

When I woke up this morning at my friends house I had no idea that today would be... exciting.

I figured that I would go to work and that it would be mildly obnoxious and then I would go home and continue packing. I had planned for this to be the case. I NEEDED this to be how it all panned out. It was not.


I wanted to write this elegant, P.C. post about how today's events occurred but I can't. I have no way of describing the fear on every person's face as they ran into my store seeking shelter. I can't tell anyone what hundreds of people screaming sounds like. I don't know where to start talking about what it felt like to see so many people hiding, COWERING in fear of losing their lives and the lives of their children. All I can tell you is what I saw happen.

Around four P.M. today I was standing at the front of my store when I witnessed around 15 people jump back and in to my store. Then I heard shouting and I saw hoards of people running for cover in stores and towards exits. A mother left her child in what she must have felt was the safety of my door way while she fought the sea of scared parents trying to get to her other child in the play area. Those three sentences took place in about 6 seconds. Then a stampede of around 70 people ran in to my store ignoring all calls for order and shouting about a shooting, a bombing, and fires all at the same time. When large crowds of people start to panic is it really easy for things to get out of control. That being said, we got them out of the store and evacuated to the outside of the mall without any casualties or injuries. While the rest of my team was doing said evacuation, I was trying to close the gates for everyone's protection. People were still running towards the store as I closed the gates and others were running out to find family members. Chaos at it's finest.

Eventually, the gates did close and I was able to direct those that I found hiding around the store as I made my way back to walk towards the other cast members. The only problem was many of those guests didn't speak English so instead of following verbal instructions we had to take the extra time to physically show them. But, like I said, everyone got out.

The duration of these events were maybe 6 minutes. Then myself and three of my other cast members sat in the back room and waited for someone to tell us what was happening. I called my sister and gave her a brief run down and told her to stay away from the mall. She said that she would go home and turn on the news so that she could give us updates about the villains running around the mall.
The news and social media informed us that said villains decided to break in to glass cases at a jewelry store and it sounded like gun shots so literally everyone started panicking and running and screaming and hiding. Finding out this information took the swat team, TPD, Highway Patrol, the FBI and I don't even know who else. At least they take shootings seriously I guess. 

Nearly an hour later the almighty "they" said everything was fine and the mall was no longer on lock down. We were free to open our stores and continue business as usual even though no one was caught. We followed these instructions and not even 20 minutes later I look up from the inside of the castle to see another mob of humans running and screaming. I stand up and there are 15 or so officers surrounding an individual on the stairs and that's I when I yelled to the others in the building and ran to shut the gates. We got them closed faster this time because of some assistance by another team member and then we went to the backroom for another 30-40 minutes and made more phone calls. The cops told us that it was safe to exit but they had also told us it was safe the first time. We were a little weary to listen again. 

When we finally decided to open we decided to do it right. We set up the stanchions and gathered a group of kids outside to call for Tink. If we were going to continue business we were going to use magic as a conduit for happiness. We walked the key down and had this huge group of kids count with us. Most of them RAN into the store to color and find new treasures. We handled that whole situation better than I EVER could have imagined, and I have. I have literally sat there and thought about what it could possibly be like to have to deal with a shooting or a threat. I don't think that even my wildest thoughts about the subject come close to what happened today. That being said, I'd say we were our own version of heroes today and that makes the craziness a little bit better.