Grief-stricken father wonders what provoked his son to kill

Asked why Sulejman Talovic stopped attending school, his father said he did not understand that. "Maybe somebody knows what happened. I don't know nothing about his school and everything."

The son worked in a laundry, while his father had construction jobs, he said. Asked if his son was upset about something that happened at work, he replied, "No, no, his heart be on it. He smile overtime."

His wife, Sabira Talovic — Sulejman's mother — is not feeling well, he said.

"She's feeling bad. I'm feeling for my son, I'm feeling for everybody who has died," he said. "She lots of crying, crying, crying."

Inside the small home Thursday, Sabira Talovic leaned against a door frame, her face grief-stricken and eyes lined with dark rings. The couple's three daughters — Medina, 13; Fatima, 11; and Savila, 7 — stood nearby, one holding a gift rose a neighbor had left outside. The slight, bearded Suljo Talovic at times talked on a cell phone, at times spoke with the Deseret Morning News.

Sabira Talovic, 37, was so devastated she could not talk to the media about their son's rampage.

Her husband gave this account of the night of the killings. "He's like working Monday," he said. "I come face to face with him."

The last time he saw him was when father and son came home from work that day, and they both showered in separate showers, in the family's two bathrooms.

"I go in bathroom, he go other bathroom," he said. Then Sulejman went to his room in the basement, while the father went into the living room upstairs. The father was watching the television news when the news broke about the Trolley Square killings. "I see somebody shot," Suljo Talovic said.

He went to the window, looked out, and saw that Sulejman's car was not there.

About 4:30 a.m. Tuesday, police officers came to the home. A police officer "says what happen: your son shoot," the father said.

The news was so shocking that Sabira Talovic had to be hospitalized. "She like almost die," he said.

The family was so shocked, "everybody cried," the father said. "No eating. I'm not eating like two, three days. My wife, too."

He wondered if the horrors in Bosnia, the war-torn nation the family left nearly a decade ago, could have influenced events here. But he did not know what would suddenly have caused his son to break now.

Omerovic said the family's experience in the war was one of privation.

"Only suffering from war," she said. "Like don't have enough food, don't have place to stay."

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