S.L. rampage eerily similar to TV show

The police are frustrated. You can hear it in Salt Lake City police detective Robin Snyder's voice when she has to report, again, that there are no new promising leads about why Sulejman Talovic opened fire a month ago in Trolley Square, killing five people and injuring four others before being killed himself by police.

The family of the shooter is frustrated. You can hear it in Ajka Omerovic's voice when she has to say, again, how sorry she is — how sorry all the extended Talovic family is — that her brother's son should be involved in such an awful thing.

The families of the victims and the community at large are frustrated. You can hear it in the sympathetic aftermath media reports from Trolley Square and in the plaintiff eulogies spoken at funerals and memorials along the Wasatch Front.

It is painfully frustrating that almost a month later, the search for an answer to the biggest question of all continues.

Why?

Why would a quiet 18-year-old leave work on a Monday afternoon and start ending lives an hour and a half later.

Why did he pick a mall and why the indiscriminate shooting of total strangers?

Could something as simple as a TV show have provided the trigger for a time bomb waiting to go off?

A network TV show that aired on Sept. 24, 2006, showed a shooting spree in a mall that was eerily similar to the real thing that happened in Trolley Square five months later.

The show was the 2006-07 season premiere of the CBS series "Cold Case." The specific episode was titled "Rampage."

In a fictitious parallel to the notorious real-life 1999 school shootings at Columbine, a pair of socially ostracized not-cool 17-year-olds open fire on strangers and fellow teenagers in the Woodland Valley Mall, killing 15 people during a 15-minute shooting spree before they turn their guns — they are armed with shotguns and handguns — on themselves.

A TV detective working the case observes, "Whatever happened to punching each other out? Now they're mowing each other down."

And a whole lot of innocent bystanders besides.

The first person shot and killed is a middle-aged man eating in the food court who looks up in total surprise at the shotgun pointed at him.