What Happened to the Black Shooter in Omaha?

With the tragic events unfolding in Omaha, Nebraska this afternoon, many news agencies descended upon the breadbasket city to cover the day's occurrences. It appears that a troubled young man, Robert Hawkins, went to the Westroads Mall with a rifle and started shooting, killing 8 people before killing himself.

While I had class most of the day (and when I did not have class I was preparing for class), I had little chance to peruse the various news organizations to get the information on what happened. Fortunately, my iGoogle page has news for me and so I clicked on the first report on it during a small break during studying. The article, from msnbc.com, fingered a young black man as the shooter, saying that a description over the police scanner described him as wearing fatigues and carrying a rifle. The article even included a blurry cell-phone photo of the man in cuffs and some quality eyewitness accounts: "Barrett said she believes she saw a deceased man inside the mall." Nothing like sketchy eyewitness accounts to portray the truth.

So why is this a big deal? Some black guy in fatigues shot up a mall in middle America, or so I was told. You can imagine my surprise to see, rather than a file photo of a black man, a scrawny white kid (not that a white kid had committed the crime, but that the initial report of a black shooter was false). Either this person pulled a reverse Michael Jackson since his photo had been taken to when the shooting occurred or MSNBC had it wrong. I figured I would just read MSNBC's updated article and find out where the discrepancy lay. Nothing. No mention of anyone of color shooting up the mall, or false (media codeword: initial) reports of a black shooter.

Maybe it was a dual-shooter type situation? Not so, according to Sergeant Teresa Negron (presumably from the Omaha PD), who says, "We do not believe that we have any other shooter. The person we believe to be the shooter has died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound." None of the other articles I have read from various news sources name this mysterious black man who was arrested. (CNN, New York Times, ABC News). So my question is this: who is this man? What was he arrested for? This reminds me of a song by Immortal Technique, " And they thought nobody noticed the news report that they did / About the bombs planted on the George Washington bridge / Four Non-Arabs arrested during the emergency / And then it disappeared from the news permanently." Obviously this case is not as serious as 9/11, but the basis remains the same: false news reports that are not corrected or clarified. Hopefully MSNBC will correct themselves and follow up on this story. Of course, I do not expect them to. Peace.

Photos (top to bottom): The mysterious black shooter (www.msnbc.com), Robert Hawkins, the real shooter (www.cnn.com), The scene outside of the Westroads Mall (www.cnn.com)