A former Target employee who was turned down for a private security license and planned to “cause havoc” was identified Monday as the man suspected of killing two people in a crowded mall parking lot before he was shot by police.
David W. Logsdon, 51, had been stopped by police while driving the car of his next-door neighbor, who police had found dead in her home hours earlier. Police did not say how Patricia Ann Reed, 67, died or if Logsdon was a suspect in her death, but they believed the events were connected.
“David Logsdon had a plan,” police Chief James Corwin said. “And that plan was that he had been an employee of that Target store and had been turned down for a private security license. His objective was to go to the mall and cause havoc.”
Logsdon applied for a private security permit from the police department, but was turned down because he had two outstanding city warrants, police said.
After the officer pulled Logsdon over Sunday, police say he shot the officer in the arm. The officer, whose wound was not life-threatening, returned fire and shattered the window of the gunman’s car.
Logsdon drove to the shopping center, fatally shot two people in the parking lot and wounded several others, then went inside the mall where he was killed by police, authorities said.
Target employee Cassie Bradshaw, 19, was in a break room with two other people when they first heard shots. Then, her co-workers saw a man in his 50s with a rifle “shooting everywhere,” she said.
“It sounded like maybe firecrackers at first but then they got louder and louder and louder, and it sounded like someone shooting a gun,” she said.
Corwin said bomb squad crews were also called to Logsdon’s home Monday after police reported his house had been “booby-trapped with a self-made bomb.” Police ordered a voluntary evacuation of the immediate area, a suburban residential area of lower income homes and apartments.
Police found the body of the first woman, Reed, Sunday afternoon after they went to her home because relatives had not seen her for days. Her car was spotted later in the day at a gas station by an officer, who pulled the driver over and was shot in the arm, police said.
The officer, whose wound was not life-threatening, returned fire and shattered the window of the gunman’s car.
The car took off and reports began arriving about 10 to 15 minutes later of shots fired at the shopping center. The man pulled into a parking space and fired at the cars on either side of him, killing two people, authorities said. He fired more shots, wounding at least two people, then went inside the mall, Sanders said.
“Everybody was leaving the mall when the officers ran inside,” Sanders said. “They confronted the man and after confronting him, shot and killed him.”
The victims shot to death at the shopping center were Leslie N. Ballew, 33, of Kansas City, and Luke A. Nilges, 30, of Shawnee, Kan.
The Target store was closed Monday. Company representatives did not immediately return a message seeking comment left at Target headquarters in Minneapolis.
The mall, one of the city’s busiest shopping centers, was shut down and officers went through each store to see if anyone else might have been involved, Sanders said.