himself. he also had improvised explosives made from fireworks. the victims i.d. d as 21-year-old brianna benlolo and tyler johnson, both mall employees. cops are not identifying the shooter. witnesses say they heard screams as shoppers ducked into nearby stores. it was horrifying. then once we heard about fatalities, then there s another wave of emotion. you re like, what s going on? what happened? and here you are on your saturday morning going about your business and to have something like this happen, it s it shakes you up. police haven t given a motive but friends of the victims say it s been a domestic dispute involving benlolo s ex-boyfriend. police scheduled a press update for 9:30 this morning. a russian teenager busted for allegedly building a weapon of mass destruction. cops raided his pennsylvania home on a tip he was dealing drugs. they quickly learned the
shots fired. i grabbed a kid, three people fell to the ground. grabbed the ki grabbed the kid and the mom was following me. i didn t know how safe it was to keep running in the open, so when i saw people running into that store, that s where i went. we were in the fitting room area. where do you go? you re in a fitting room area. you re just as vulnerable. erin mcpike has more from outside the mall in columbia, maryland. the clwhen the shots rang ou and terrified so many people here because the shooting took place at a second level store that overlooks the food court. the shooter shot two young adults brianna benlolo and
treated and released from the hospital yesterday. overnight, police did identify the shooter but they are not yet releasing his name to the public. i saw people sitting there, food was knocked over, everyone just started running. kids were running. you just ran and you just run to the nearest place you could find. reporter: chaos at columbia mall in maryland as a gunman opens fire killing two workers inside a second-story sports apparel shop called zumiez, then killed himself. thought i heard something fall. it sounded like bricks. i saw three people that were shot fall. so everybody ducked to the ground. heard more than ten shots. reporter: police identified the dead employees as 23-year-old brianna benlolo and 25-year-old tyler johnson. police say the shooter was carrying makeshift explosives. a robot was used to examine the
we just don t know that. we re working to find that out now. reporter: police also say that aguilar purchased that shotgun about a month ago in nearby montgomery county. but part of the mystery is that he was also carrying a backpack that had two homemade explosive devices. they were never detonated. and police were able to disable them. but he also had a lot of ammunition on him. and so police aren t yet sure if this was a targeted event or if it could have been a bigger mass shooting, miguel. erin mcpike in columbia, maryland, thank you very much. we continue to learn more information of the victims in the maryland mall shootings. coming up next hour, a cnn exclusive interview with a close friend of one of the victims, 21-year-old brianna benlolo. question number three, what will happen to amanda knox if she s found guilty again? it s the case that seems to have no end. knox and her former italian boyfriend are waiting for a third verdict from an italian
apparently that at least one of the victims, the female victim, had with the alleged shooter, and that is that they both lived in college park? is there any reporter: they both lived in college park. that is what the police chief said. what he does not know is how close together they lived. now, the female victim, the 21-year-old, brianna benlolo, as we know, was an employee of the store. she also had a 2-year-old child. but we do not know what the relationship may have been between the 19-year-old shooter and that 21-year-old victim and the 25-year-old victim. that s why we have all these questions and the investigation is still ongoing to determine what kind of relationship they could have had. but yes, the shooter and the female victim did live in college park. they just don t know how close together they were. right. haven t established a connection yet. thank you so much, erin mcpike in columbia, maryland for us today.