Trolley rampage matches statistics

Deseret Morning News graphic    Homicide research findings from 1999

In a public mass murder, it appears you are statistically most likely to die in a commercial location on a Monday at the hands of a young man with a gun.

The numbers documented in a 1999 report published by the Homicide Research Working Group appear to reflect the events of the Trolley Square shooting rampage. Police said 18-year-old Sulejman Talovic went on a killing spree inside the mall Monday night, killing five and wounding four others before dying in a shootout with police.

"You get those offenders, they need to find a convenient place to kill somebody," Auburn University sociology and criminology professor Tom Petee told the Deseret Morning News. "They're really angry and there's a diffuse victim pattern. There's not a specific victim or a specific location, it's just a convenient target."

The academic report tracked incidents of public mass murder in the United States from 1975-99, using newspaper accounts of the crimes. It offers some cold statistics relating to the real-life horror of the Trolley Square shootings.

Petee and co-author Kathy Padgett tracked age trends, gun use, number of victims, gender of victims, and even the time and location of public mass murder episodes.

"Mass murder makes up only 2 or 3 percent of all homicides," Petee said. "The public (mass murder) is a rarer event, even."

Most mass-murder events occur in a home. Petee's report defined mass murder as "three or more persons in a limited area (usually one place) over a limited time period."

The average age of the killer has dropped from 23.7 in 1975 to 19.3 in 1999. Sulejman Talovic was 18.

"Mass murder involving the use of firearms resulted in an average of 4.86 victims killed per incident," the study said.

At Trolley Square, five people — Jeffrey Walker, 52; Vanessa Quinn, 29; Kirsten Hinckley, 15; Brad Frantz, 24; and Teresa Ellis, 29 — were killed. The study found women are more likely to be victims in a mass-murder spree (30.9 percent), while other studies have said men are much more likely to be victims of a general homicide.

The more complex issue is guns. Firearms were used 88 percent of the time in the study. Addressing gun control and assault-weapon bans, the study noted 63 percent of the guns used in mass-murder sprees were purchased legally and the buyer underwent a background check.

Salt Lake City police and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives are still investigating how Talovic acquired his guns. Authorities are still looking into the Bosnian immigrant's background.