Shooting outside Destiny USA sent mall goers scrambling
SYRACUSE, N.Y. June 20 2023 — Jan Juba Arway dropped her daughter off for work at Destiny USA on Saturday evening, and decided to stick around to look for clothes for an upcoming work trip. While shopping, Arway’s daughter texted her to ask her if she was safe.
Arway was at first confused – until the next few texts, when her daughter explained that there was an active shooter. That’s when she said chaos erupted around her.
“I see security guys just running, and people scattering around me,” said Arway.
She would later learn that there was an “isolated incident” according to Syracuse Police, with an argument that began inside a store ending with one of the people involved shooting and injuring the other outside the walkway bridge entrance on Solar Street. The victim is expected to survive, with police still searching for the shooter.
But Arway had none of that information at the time; given she was at a public location in the United States, she assumed the worst, believing a mass shooting was unfolding. She said that security guards gave conflicting and confusing messages, with some told to find a place to hide and others told to evacuate entirely.
She ended up inside Macy’s after an employee there ushered her inside and locked the gates. She saw others scrambling for the exits.
There was people with kids with car seats running out of the door by Dunkin Donuts … People literally fighting to exit the door. It was a huge panic. Everybody trying to rush out of the parking lot with their cars.
Arway eventually connected with her daughter, who was sheltering at her place of work, and they were able to leave. They found a huge line of police cars outside, still unsure of what had happened.
Wellington Young was also left to react to gunfire without much context or information. Young is a co owner of Fuzzy Rides, a kiosk that provides kids with animal themed scooters to have fun and ride around on. Young said he had just gotten a young girl onto a scooter and was chatting with her dad when he heard a sound.
“It was a quiet night. All of a sudden; pop. Like the sound of someone dropping a hard-cover textbook onto a tile floor,” said Young.
Young’s father Bradley, a partner at Fuzzy Rides, said that he got a text alert from Destiny USA that something had happened. He immediately called his son to see if he was safe; and told him to get out as fast as he could.
“We try to be as cautious as we can, that’s all we can do,” said Bradley, ” this situation exists all across the country, Syracuse is not alone in that.”
As of February of this year, the last time a gun was fired at the mall, Syracuse police confirmed that the mall independently pays two to five officers each day to work a security detail. A spokesperson for Onondaga County confirmed that the mall also pays county probation officers to work security four times a week, including every Friday and Saturday during peak mall hours.
According to Lt. Matthew Malinowski, the shooting that occurred Saturday night would not have been stopped by an increased security presence.
“This was a dispute that lead out to the outside of the mall, knowing there was already cameras in place, security and police, this was a person brazen enough to pull out a gun and shoot someone and run away. I don’t know if we had 100 officers that would have stopped that happening,” said Lt. Malinowski.
Lt. Malinowski is also in charge of the department’s security detail at Destiny USA. He said that there are ongoing conversations with Stephen Congel, the owner of Destiny USA with Pyramid Group. He said that the mall has improved the number of security cameras, but so far no movement on whether or not they’d consider metal detectors.
The last shooting at the mall occurred in February when a 14-year-old aiming at a group he was in a dispute with, accidentally fired a round at a trash can and fled the scene. There have been a total of two shootings. matching 2022. Overall crime is now the worst its been since 2019, according to Syracuse Police data.
Through June 13 of this year, Syracuse Police have responded to 706 calls at the mall, nearly 200 higher than the call numbers in 2020, 2021, and 2022. In 2019, the number of calls at that point in the year was 763. The highest number of calls this year are coming from larcenies (147), burglaries (20), “offenses against family” (24), and simple assault (12), all of which are higher than they were by June of 2022.
