10th anniversary of Trolley Square shootings arrives as gun-control advocates mount challenges

Eight years after a gunman opened fire in Salt Lake City's Trolley Square mall, Carolyn Tuft and Anne Bagley found themselves in the same bank line.

Bagley had been at the mall on Feb. 12, 2007, to eat dinner with her two daughters and two granddaughters. They all escaped unharmed. But the gunman shot Tuft three times and killed her 15-year-old daughter, Kirsten Hinckley.

At the bank, Bagley recognized Tuft and introduced herself. When the two of them got outside, they talked. That's when Tuft told Bagley about Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America. Tuft had recently started a chapter in Utah.

"I feel like I have a little bit of power now to make a difference, to make us all safer," Bagley said in an interview Thursday. She oversees membership for the Utah chapter.

The 10th anniversary of the Trolley Square shootings is Sunday, and it is Moms Demand Action that is planning the vigil commemorating the event.

The vigil will be at 6 p.m. at Zion Evangelical Lutheran Church, 1070 Foothill Drive, in Salt Lake City.

Terri Marshall-Gilfillan, who works with volunteers for Moms Demand Action's Utah chapter, said the vigil will focus on the shootings and the victims, not discuss gun control measures specifically.

"We will be talking generally about how we want to make the world safer," she said.

Ten years ago, Sulejman Talovic, 18, parked his car on the parking terrace that then existed on Trolley Square's west side.

He used a 12-gauge shotgun to kill Jeffrey Walker, 52, and wounded his 16-year-old son, A.J. Walker.

Talovic fired the shotgun two more times at another man, Shawn Munns, wounding him. Then Talovic went inside the mall.

Talovic would use the shotgun and a .38 Special revolver to kill five people and wound four.

The casualties stopped when an off-duty Ogden police officer, Ken Hammond, encountered and exchanged gunfire with Talovic. A Salt Lake City police SWAT team soon arrived and killed Talovic as he was still firing at Hammond and a Salt Lake City police sergeant who also responded.

The shootings immediately spurred discussions about guns in Utah, particularly focused on whether people with mental illness should have access to them. While there is no record of Talovic being diagnosed as mentally ill — no reason for the shootings was identified — Talovic came to the United States as a Bosnian refugee, and many wondered whether his years of exposure to the Bosnian War played a role in the attacks.

Two-and-a-half months after the shootings, then-U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services and former Utah Gov. Mike Leavitt came to Salt Lake City to hold a roundtable discussion on guns and mental health.

Chris Burbank — who was Salt Lake City's police chief during the Trolley Square shootings and attended that round-table discussion — says there has been no progress on how to keep guns away from someone who is mentally ill.

"The bottom line is, we have people in this country that are intent on doing people harm and they have access to firearms," Burbank said recently.

Burbank favors background checks for all gun purchases. He believes it would reduce the ease of access to guns.

Talovic received and passed a background check when he bought the pistol-grip shotgun, although the clerk at the gun store failed to properly document Talovic as a resident alien. The clerk later pleaded guilty to a federal misdemeanor.

Talovic purchased his pistol from two co-workers when he was 17. Typically, such transactions do not require a background check, but the two co-workers pleaded guilty to charges in federal court. One pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor count of transferring a firearm to a juvenile and received no jail time. The other defendant pleaded guilty to the same charge and to unlawfully possessing or transferring a weapon; he received 15 months in prison.

On the night of the shootings, Bagley said she and her family had just finished dinner at The Old Spaghetti Factory. They parked on the same terrace where Talovic would shoot the Walkers, but Bagley and her family decided to visit the Basket Loft store after dinner.

They heard a boom, Bagley recalled Thursday, and soon a woman came running, screaming that there was a man with a gun. At Bagley's instruction, the store owner locked the glass doors and turned off the lights. Everyone who had been in the store hid in a closet that had no door. When they turned off the closet light, Bagley's 15-month-old granddaughter would cry.

Bagley said police arrived after about 90 minutes, told them all to raise their hands.

"They told us later they didn't know if there was a shooter hiding in there with us or not," Bagley said.

Police then evacuated Bagley, her two daughters and two granddaughters.

As police were leading them down the escalator, Bagley looked into the Cabin Fever store, she said. That's where Talovic shot Tuft and Hinckley, and where he killed Teresa Ellis, 29, and Brad Frantz, 24.

"Up to that point, we had no idea that anybody had been killed," Bagley said.

A shooting with even more casualties, 2012's attack at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., spurred the creation of Moms Demand Action.

Tuft acknowledged in an interview Friday that it took a long time after the Trolley Square shootings to get a gun-control group organized in Utah. She called Utah a "gun-loving state" where a lot of people don't support what Moms Demand Action is doing.

"People thought [of mass shootings], 'Oh, that won't happen to me because it's such a rare event,' " she said.

Tuft appeared alongside President Barack Obama as he discussed guns in 2016.

Not everyone was happy to hear Tuft and Obama, a Democrat, talking about firearms. Utah's longest-serving member of the House of Representatives, Rob Bishop, accused the then-president of "exploiting tragedy for political gain."

"His proposals would not have prevented the recent tragedies our nation has endured," the Republican said then.

Moms Demand Action's Utah chapter has about 800 members, Bagley said, "and is growing." The number is far lower than that of Utah gun-control opponents, where 31.9 percent of adults own a firearm, according to a survey published in 2015 in the journal Injury Prevention.

Moms Demand Action is not trying to ban all firearms, Bagley said. It wants people to be safer around guns. Moms Demand Action teaches parents about gunlocks and how to ask their kids' friends' parents about whether their guns are secure.

"We're not trying to take anybody's guns away, and we're not anti-gun" Tuft said Friday. "We're 'safe gun.' "

Moms Demand Action also wants background checks for all gun purchases, and the group is fighting efforts to make it easer to own or carry a gun. The Utah chapter, Bagley said, opposes a bill in the Legislature, HB112, that would remove the misdemeanor criminal penalty for someone over age 21 who carries a concealed weapon without a permit.

The chapter also opposes a bill in Congress called the "Hearing Protection Act of 2017." The bill would make firearm silencers cheaper and easier to purchase by eliminating a $200 tax and a nine-month approval process.

Utah's four House of Representative members are co-sponsors. A Utah company, SilencerCo, is a major manufacturer of firearm noise suppressors. Eric Trump, son of President Donald Trump, has visited the company in West Valley City and appeared in a video promoting it.

The bill is being touted as a way to protect the hearing of gun owners, but Bagley believes making silencers easier to acquire would remove the safety feature that alerted her and other shoppers to trouble that night at Trolley Square — the loud noise Talovic's guns made when he fired them.

"If the gunman at Trolley Square had a silencer on his gun, he had enough ammunition in his backpack to kill everyone," Bagley said.

ncarlisle@sltrib.com

Twitter: @natecarlisle