‘Not today Satan’: Mom, daughter safe from harm during shooting

When Rachel Lemons and her 14-year-old daughter Mabel Cox set out for a memorable, late summer vacation to the Twin Cities last week, little did they know the lasting memories this trip would entail.

Their vacation plans included trips to the zoo and shopping at IKEA and the Mall of America.

It was their last destination that proved to be most memorable. 

Although the mother and daughter had planned to peruse the multiple floors of stores at the Mall of America in the days to come, their stop there came earlier than anticipated. It just so happened that a friend of Mabel’s from Tea had forgotten her cell phone at home, so they served as the “courier service,” and agreed to meet up with Mabel’s friend at the Mall of America to deliver it.

After a short exchange of words, Rachel and Mabel headed down to the first floor to some of their favorite shops. At 4:15 p.m., Rachel took a photo of a shirt she liked at Made Well, and five minutes later, while in Free the People, their memory-making vacation quickly escalated. 

‘My two friends were at a different store and one of them called me and said, ‘I think there’s a shooting or something happened because there are people running, people crying. We just got kicked out of the store we were in, they pushed everyone out,’” Mabel recalled.

The gunshots the girls referred to were connected to an incident that started as a fight between two groups at the Nike store cash register around 4:15 p.m., KSTP-TV reported. One group left, but someone armed with a handgun circled back to fire at least three shots at the store before running away.

Law enforcement then placed Mall of America on lockdown shortly after the shots were fired. It wasn’t until about 5:40 p.m. that Bloomington police lifted the lockdown, announcing that the area had been secured. 

Rachel said the store manager they were in quickly went into “lockdown mode.”

“She said, ‘We need to go in the back as quietly as possible,’” Rachel said.

The manager closed the first door behind them and they began piling boxes of merchandise in front of the door. The store’s bathroom would serve as the group of 14’s safe space for the next two hours.

 “It wasn’t a tiny bathroom, thank goodness, but 14 of us all in there, that was a lot,” Rachel said.

“We were shoulder to shoulder,” Mabel reminds.

With the bathroom door securely locked, Rachel said Kent, a tall man who was shopping with his wife in the store, grabbed a hammer off of a shelf.

“I remember thinking, I wonder if that’s our only weapon,” Rachel said. 

Huddled in the back corner of the bathroom, Rachel’s back was up against the wall and she said she could hear what sounded like gunshots.

“It’s a very erratic sound, and I know that kind of sound will reverberate in a big, open area like that. So, location – who knows – it was very unsettling,” Rachel said.

In the quietness of the store’s bathroom, Rachel said all that could be heard were “anxious thumbs, scared thumbs” tapping on cell phones.

“Every now and again, your thoughts would get the best of you and you would cry a little bit,” she said.

Keeping an close watch on her daughter, Rachel said Mabel displayed a sense of calmness at times and at other times, a look of fear. She also wondered about the others they were sharing this space of safety with.

“I was praying very much for the shooter’s heart to be turned. Whatever is happening, we didn’t know if it was terrorism, one person that’s mad at everybody, a gang …,” she said.

Rachel also began messaging her two adult sons.

“As a parent, I was like, what do you tell them? What do you say? But I couldn’t imagine not reaching out to them knowing that I could have if something did happen. I told them that I loved them and asked them to pray, and then I got on social media, because I started looking at news,” she said.

Details of what had unfolded at the Mall were slowing trickling out, said Mabel, who kept eye contact with the store manager.

“Every time there was a sound, I’d look up and we’d make eye contact because we could hear them,” Mabel said.

They soon learned that the the shots were fired on the second floor right above where they were hunkering down.

“Slowly, we started to see on social media that there was an active shooter situation and then started seeing posts of people saying, ‘SWAT,’ and ‘Hey, everybody, SWAT and police are taking over the Mall of America.’ I think that made me feel both nervous and a lot better knowing that there were that many people,” Rachel said.

Breaking up the quietness of the room, Rachel told the others she was praying for them all.

“Then somebody said, ‘Oh, me, too.’ I remember I raised my hand up and I said, ‘The blood of Jesus covers all of us,’ and then the lady standing, Kent’s wife, said, ‘Oh, you’re a believer.’ And I said, ‘Oh, yes!’ He said, ‘You’re a Christian, and I said, ‘Yes, we are.’ And then she said, ‘Psalm 91.’”

Rachel referred to the Psalm on her phone.

“I read the entire thing, quietly, to myself, and I showed it to Mabel to read, but I could hear that noise behind me. To read about how the enemies might fire their arrows at you, it was like a complete encounter. Then, I remembered on the way there I had been praying, that whatever lies before me – I’m thinking life, school starting, business, good things, He absolutely gave me a word, He absolutely answered me with His presence and said ‘Everything’s going to be OK.’ I realized in that moment that was for now, too,” Rachel said.

It was two hours later that the store manager received the “all clear.”

“Looking back now, you feel like you were in a vacuum,” Rachel said.

Rachel and Mabel went back to their hotel room, contacted family members and close friends, and made the decision to move forward with their vacation.

“I said we should just go and do something and not think about this. I had never been to a Dave and Buster’s, so we decided to go there,” Rachel said.

“It was in a mall,” Mabel tosses in.

“A different mall,” her mom notes.

It was then that Rachel put out a second post on her Facebook page: “‘Not today, Satan. We’re not going to let you steal another single second of this day of our vacation.’ And so, from that moment forward, we had a blast. We played some really awesome games, we had some great food and the next day we went to two zoos and I probably put 12,000 steps on my feet. We actually did go back to the Mall of America two days later. It was eerie walking down on the first floor.”

Rachel said that she and Mabel will likely return to the Mall of America one day, but no time soon.

Instead, she’ll continue to reflect on a sense of peace she felt the Lord instill in her while driving to the Twin Cities for this mother-daughter’s vacation of memories.

“We have been through traumatic things in our family and are rebuilding by the grace of God, and have definitely come out much more healed, much more aware, but we don’t need any more trauma,” Rachel said. “I actually felt shaken up a little, but there was also a peace, and I just knew that even if something terrible happened, I knew that we would be OK.”