30 From O.C. Group Survive Rampage at Utah Library

Pam Drake left her second-floor desk at the Mormon Church’s family history library in Salt Lake City and walked down the spiral staircase into a nightmare.

The 36-year-old Anaheim woman barely stepped up to the information desk about 10:30 Thursday morning when a man with a handgun calmly walked in the front entrance and started methodically shooting people.

For what seemed to her like an eternity during the 90-minute siege, she ducked under tables and hid until she could escape, running past bodies through the lobby.

“I realized there are people dead, and I saw them, and it could have been me,” she said in a telephone interview from her hotel room late Thursday night.

Drake was among 30 Orange County residents in the library when a man police identified as Sergei Babarin, a 70-year-old Russian immigrant with a history of schizophrenia, opened fire. He killed two people and wounded four others before police killed him.

Altogether, some 200 people were inside the world’s largest genealogical library, across the street from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints Temple and Tabernacle, when the shooting broke out.

In the pandemonium that followed, some ran panic-stricken through a rear exit and were escorted quickly to safety by police. Others cowered under desks throughout the ordeal, wondering how one minute they could be poring over property deeds and wills from the 1800s and the next battling for survival.

On an upper floor, some people were blissfully unaware at first of the danger. Employees rushing up the staircase led them out an exit.

Though the shooting was over about noon, the Orange County contingent wasn’t fully accounted for until 4 p.m. The 30 residents at the library were among 45 members of the Orange County Genealogy Society who traveled to Salt Lake City on Sunday for a weeklong visit to work on family histories.

For Drake, the trip was a Valentine’s Day present from her husband, who paid the $550 for her to look up old family biographies and pursue her obsession.

Her back was to the library’s glass-door entrance when she heard the first volley.

“I heard the shot and thought, ‘It couldn’t be a gunshot,’ ” she said. “It’s got to be a truck backfiring. We’re in a library, for Pete’s sake.”

She turned and saw a woman at the greeter’s table fall to the ground, wounded. Drake spent the next few minutes ducking from desk to desk, focusing on the man dressed in a long coat and baggy pants and waving a gun.

As she cowered close to the ground, she said she vividly remembered the screams:

“Somebody call the police!” “Get down, get down! He’s got a gun!” “He’s reloading! Get out of there!”

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Janet Spurgeon of Cypress, one of the organizers of the trip, was locked inside a back office with 16 others for three hours as police searched the building for a possible second shooter.

As the group waited, she said, one of the Mormon elders led them in prayer. Someone shared a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Another person passed a bottle of water around.

Immediately after the siege ended, Pat Cohen of Huntington Beach, the Orange County group’s president, set up a sign-in sheet in their hotel lobby and told members to call home.

Cohen called her husband to give this message to reporters who had been calling the couple’s home all day: “Tell them that everybody from Orange County is OK.”

The group, true to the devotion that had brought them to Utah, decided to go ahead with a previously scheduled seminar on how to look up land and property deeds.

After the meeting, however, the group members, many still shaken, had an opportunity to reflect.

It could have been much worse, they said. At 11:15 a.m., the group was scheduled to meet in the lobby, where the shooting first erupted, to go to lunch at a nearby cafeteria.

“I’m not a real religious person,” Drake said, “but I kind of get the feeling that someone knew what was going on and helped us out.”