Rampage leaves a scar on Omaha

Thunderstruck is one of those not-hefty-enough words that we occasionally find ourselves fumbling with when the unimaginable falls upon us. But that’s the way it was for me on Wednesday when my car radio informed me that nine people (including the gunman) were dead in Omaha.

For five-plus years, I was the deputy editorial page editor and then the editorial page editor of the Omaha World-Herald. To me, it seemed at that time the sweetest city I’d ever lived in -- big enough to offer wonderful amenities, small enough not to be a hassle. It was a can’t-happen-here place.

But it can. Robert Hawkins proved that. As has happened in Littleton, Colo., and Pearl, Miss. . . . and the string could of course be stretched out.

Omaha is one of this nation’s most un-understood cities. This was demonstrated a few years ago when the local chamber of commerce commissioned a study that reported that the community didn’t have a good reputation or a bad reputation -- it essentially had no reputation at all. But here, in one paragraph, is what I found:

A place that had started as a slaughterhouse and lead-smelter burg and evolved into a mid-size city of high-rises, corporate headquarters, epicenter of Warren Buffett, with a superb symphony orchestra, great museums and a zoo that I’d be willing to put up against San Diego’s or Chicago’s. Metro population, 800,000. But with racial and gang problems.

Yet, in essence, nobody around the country knew any of that. Well, they will know a sordid version of it now, in ways that cause city officials to want to dig into holes and pull the dirt after them.

I was heartened to see Thomas Warren, the police chief, holding forth on the tragedy. The bridge between that and my first meeting with him in my office is instructive. He was then a young lieutenant making the best possible use of a federally funded program to be sure that would-be gang members understood that crimes committed with guns would have terrible consequences when they got caught. And he seemed to be making some headway; crime stats were down in the roughest sections of town.

Tom Warren is one of those rare people you meet who is calm in any crisis and comfortable within his own epidermis. A calamity like Wednesday’s can’t be pursued to its logical end because there isn’t one. But I have no hesitation in saying that an investigation that takes place on his watch will be comprehensive and to-the-point.

A little perspective on the site of the slayings.

Omaha is bounded on the east by the Missouri River. Expansion -- and Omaha has had a lot of it in the last couple of decades -- is perforce to the west. Old Omaha, which dates to pre-Civil War days, has many charms, but if you want upscale bling, you look west, and that’s where the Westroads Mall and the Van Maur store and 19-year-old Robert Hawkins converged.

It may be that we’ll never know what -- maybe there’s nothing instructive to know about it -- caused him to spew venom and hot lead in that particular place. But it’s worth observing, in the early going, that he could have found equally easy marks in the zoo or in the Old Market bistro district, or for that matter in the airport concourse ahead of the security gates. In the mall were people and money, or at least plastic, buying hoped-for happiness for the holidays. Maybe to the killer it was about that.

I agonize over terrible calamities like this, and they strike home especially hard when one has stood within a dozen feet of the place from which the shooter squeezed the trigger. There’s nothing abstract about that; it gets you in the gut and robs you of sleep. And I say all this as someone who in his youth shot a few quail and could, with an unscoped .22-caliber rifle, plunk a tin can off a clod at 50 yards.

I’m not against guns. I am against guns in the hands of unhinged people, and I would almost give an arm to know what we as a society can do about this. And in this case, no one can point to the gun laws as an answer because Robert Hawkins stole the one he used. No law can do anything about that.

But I mourn for Omaha. I knew it as a cheery place where strangers, meeting on the sidewalk, routinely smiled and said, “Hi, how are ya?” Now I worry that they’ll be saying, “Hmm, who are ya?”

charles.reinken@latimes.com