20-year-old arrested after five shot dead at Washington state mall

SEATTLE — The authorities have arrested a Turkish-born man yesterday in connection with a deadly shooting at a mall in north-western Washington state the day before, which left five people dead including a teenage cancer survivor.

Police named the suspect as Arcan Cetin, 20, a resident of the nearby town of Oak Harbor, and said he was arrested about 24 hours after the killings.

The authorities, speaking at a news conference on Saturday night (US local time) said the suspect was taken into custody without incident about 6.30pm. Officials also said they had received numerous tips about the gunman and that surveillance footage had helped locate him.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation office in Seattle said it had no evidence the shooting was terror-related. Charges were pending, said the authorities, who also said it was too early to say what led to the shootings.

The attack at Cascade Mall in Burlington — about 105km north of Seattle — killed four women in the cosmetics section of a Macy’s department store, said the authorities. A man was critically wounded in the shooting and was taken to Harborview Medical Center in Seattle, where he died.

The gunman, who was armed with a rifle, left the scene before the police arrived. Officials said they recovered the weapon at the scene. They declined to give details about the weapon or to say how many rounds had been fired. Photographs of Cetin on a Myspace account showed him holding a handgun and a rifle.

Sarai Lara was the youngest of the victims, at 16. The high school sophomore had survived cancer as a young girl. Belinda Galde, 64, and her mother Beatrice Dotson, 95 were also identified as victims of the killing.

Another victim is believed by her family to be Shayla Martin, a 52-year-old who worked as a make-up artist at the department store. Chuck Eagan, a longtime Boeing maintenance worker was also killed.

At the news conference on Saturday night, Mayor Steve Sexton of Burlington said the shooting happened at a time and in a setting that were ordinary: A Friday night at a mall.

Referring to the shooting, he said: “They changed those families forever. It changed our city, I’m afraid to some extent, forever.”

Security camera footage showed the man entering the mall without a weapon. Footage taken 10 minutes later showed him entering Macy’s with a rifle.

At a news conference earlier on Saturday, the authorities described the tense moments after the shooting, as officers searched the roughly 440,000-square-foot mall for the attacker, finding only store employees and shoppers.

Lieutenant Chris Cammock, the commander of the multi-agency response team conducting the investigation told The Seattle Times that Cetin has not been charged and would be booked into the Skagit County Jail.

He also said the detectives do not know whether Cetin had a connection with any of the victims and had asked members of the public to continue to stay away from the shopping mall.

The FBI said that it had “no information to suggest that additional attacks” were planned in Washington State, and that it was coordinating intelligence efforts with the local authorities. More than 200 officers from at least 26 agencies responded to the shooting, said the authorities.

One woman, Ms Tari Caswell, told The Skagit Valley Herald that she had been in the Macy’s women’s dressing room when she heard four loud pops, followed by seven or eight more.

“I just stayed quiet in the dressing room because it just didn’t feel right,” she said. “And it got very quiet. And then I heard a lady yelling for help, and a man came and got me and another lady, and we ran out of the store.”

The attack was the seventh time this year in which at least four people were killed in a shooting in Washington, according to The Seattle Times.