A few years ago I was in a mall in boca raton. I was in the tesla store sitting in the drivers seat of a tesla playing with all the fart noises etc when I looked up (the car faced out the store window into the mall corridor) and saw a sea of people running for their life and screaming, literally trampling each other and tripping. I jumped out the window of the car and locked myself in the back office with the other people who were in the store. We were there for almost an hour before the police came and escorted us out. They ran us through a back hallway that connected to all of the stores and lead to a loading dock where we exited into the parking lot. We passed the SWAT team as they were coming into the building. Across the street from the mall at a restaurant we heard a young girl who had heard the shots and got separated from her mom. I called my parents, told them I was safe, and a few hours got on my plane and headed back to Newark.

When my plane landed and I took my phone off of airplane mode, I googled the Boca Raton mass shooting and the headline read “popped balloon mistaken for active shooter causes mass hysteria”.

It’s fascinated me ever since that the fear of being shot is just below the surface enough that once one person ignited it, it spread throughout an entire mall like a contagious disease.