"As you can see, this individual was well-prepared," Burbank said, apparently referring to the young man's backpack filled with ammunition "He had one purpose." Burbank said the shooter used a shot gun and a .38-caliber handgun.

Soon, the entire area was cordoned off as a crime scene. Police remained at the mall even as late as Tuesday afternoon. By earlier in the day, officers allowed people to enter the mall's parking lot to retrieve their cars, one at a time. At one point, about a dozen people waited at the northeast entrance to the parking lot for their names to be called so they could go in and get their cars.

Witnesses who had returned to get their vehicles recalled the events of the tragic evening:

Verna Clark, Bountiful, was at Trolley Square Monday night with her husband and 7-month-old baby and her parents, who were visiting from out of town, to go to an antique store.

"We heard kind of like bang. At first we thought it was construction that was going on. It sounded like they were doing construction." She thought "it was really rude of them to be doing construction this time of night."

A man in the antique store beckoned them to come inside. A woman "starts to run down the stairs and she runs away from the stairs, and we duck in and we start hearing more of a bang. We're just kind of hiding behind, hiding in the store, we hear all these multiple bangs. First we hear the bang bang, which I think is the shotgun, I could hear the bang and then he reloads and pumps the gun, and then another bang.

"And then we actually got separated from my dad, and then we see that the off-duty policeman went down to my dad and pulled him out of the way. ... I wasn't looking out the window but someone was looking out the window and kind of telling us what was going on. We could hear the bang bang of I think of the off-duty policeman and the guy looking out the window could see one body down. And we were just concerned because we didn't know where my dad was. Then they told us it wasn't my dad.

"We were all kind of panicky in the room and we could hear a woman in the back crying. Then the policemen came, and they have a gun, and they just tell us to run out." Her husband, Hugh Clark, was running with the baby, James.

"We weren't sure if there was another gunman loose. ... They were just evacuating us out as quickly as possible."

She estimated the amount of time they were in the antique store as 15 or 20 minutes. "We weren't one of those people who got stuck in the mall for hours."