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She Was Just a 13-Year-Old at the Mall. Then the Gunfire Found Her.

I’ve worked scenes where people were angry, scenes where people were fighting, and scenes where everyone was shouting so loudly that nobody could hear the officers trying to take control. But what happened at Alderwood Mall in Lynnwood, Washington, on July 3, 2024, is the kind of call that changes the way you hear the word victim. When we arrived at the food court, the first thing I heard was someone telling people to move back. Then I saw a teenage girl lying on the ground. She was thirteen years old. Her name was Jada Woods Johnson. She hadn’t been part of the confrontation. She hadn’t been the person anyone was looking for. She was simply there when someone decided to settle a conflict with a gun. By the time we reached her, CPR was already underway. She was unconscious. She wasn’t breathing. Someone was working to seal the wound in her chest while officers pushed the crowd farther away. I remember how quickly the scene changed. A few moments earlier, this had been a mall full of ordinary people. Now every person standing nearby had become either a potential witness, a potential piece of evidence, or someone trying to understand what they had just seen.

We took over the medical response and started figuring out what had happened. The bullet had entered the front of Jada’s upper chest, and officers noticed what appeared to be no exit wound on her back. She never regained consciousness while we were there. The commands around me became strangely practical: check for another injury, protect the scene, keep people back, find a chest seal, locate the shell casings. That is one of the hardest parts of scenes like this. Your mind knows there is a child on the ground, but your job forces you to think about ten other things at the same time. Where did the shooter go? How many rounds were fired? Who saw the confrontation? Is the suspect still inside the mall? Are there other victims? We began hearing that the shooter might have run toward Macy’s. Witnesses described a Black male, possibly wearing a white hoodie. Other reports said several people had fled. Officers moved through the area while mall security reviewed surveillance footage, but there was no suspect waiting for us inside Macy’s. Whoever had fired the gun was already gone.

Then the scene became a search for memory. We moved witnesses away from the food court and gathered them near the fireplace so investigators could speak with them without the crowd interfering. Some people were visibly shaken. Others were trying to reconstruct seconds that suddenly mattered more than anything else in their lives. I remember telling them to slow down and think about everything from the moment they arrived at the mall: what they heard, what they saw, who was running, what people were wearing, and which direction they went. Sometimes a witness thinks the smallest detail is useless. A jacket. A voice. A person standing somewhere they shouldn’t have been. But detectives need those details because a shooting scene doesn’t tell you everything. The people who were there do.

There was another reality hanging over the scene, too. Jada’s mother’s phone number had been obtained, but officers were holding off on making the notification while the investigation developed. That part of the job is difficult to explain to someone who has never seen it. There is a family somewhere who still believes their daughter is having a normal day. Meanwhile, officers are standing inside a mall trying to determine exactly what happened to her. You have to be careful with every piece of information because once you tell a family something, there is no taking it back. Around us, officers continued marking evidence, protecting shell casings, coordinating scene security, and trying to determine whether anyone else had seen the shooting. The mall was still physically there, but it no longer felt like a mall. It had become a crime scene.

The break finally came from people who knew the community. Investigators and witnesses were separated, statements were collected, and surveillance footage was reviewed. Then a teacher from Kamiak High School and the school’s resource officer recognized the suspect. His name was 16-year-old Samuel Gizaw. Suddenly, the investigation had something it didn’t have before: an identity. But knowing who someone is and finding them are two different things. Officers still had to locate him, confirm the information, and take him into custody. Eventually, Gizaw was taken into custody and transported into the system. There was no dramatic movie ending to it. No chase through the mall. No confrontation that made everything feel resolved. Just handcuffs, a vehicle, a gate opening, and a teenager being taken away while investigators continued working on the case.

The legal story that followed showed just how far the consequences would reach. According to the source, Gizaw was initially released on $500,000 bail. Prosecutors later filed adult charges, and a new $2 million arrest warrant was issued. He initially pleaded not guilty. But the story did not end there. In August 2026, Gizaw pleaded guilty to second-degree murder, accepted responsibility for Jada Woods Johnson’s death, and apologized to her family. His sentencing was scheduled for October 23, 2026. The courtroom outcome came more than two years after that afternoon at the mall, but for Jada’s family, the passage of time could never turn the clock backward.

What stayed with me about that scene was how ordinary everything around it had been. People had come to the mall expecting food, shopping, friends, maybe a few hours away from home. Jada was thirteen. She wasn't there because she had chosen violence. She wasn't part of the argument that set everything in motion. Yet when the gunfire came, none of that mattered to the bullet. It crossed the space between the people involved in the confrontation and found someone who had nothing to do with it. That is the part I think about whenever I hear someone describe a shooting as if it happened only between two people. Violence rarely respects the boundaries people imagine they have drawn around it. Someone else can always be standing nearby.

And when I think back to that day, I remember the chest seal more than anything else. Officers were fighting to keep it in place while others searched for evidence and cleared the crowd. A small piece of medical equipment became one of the last things we could physically do for a girl who should have been thinking about something completely different that afternoon. Eventually, the mall would reopen. The witnesses would go home. The shell casings would become evidence bags. The surveillance footage would become part of an investigation, and the courtroom would become the place where responsibility was addressed. But none of those things changed the first fact we learned when we arrived: a thirteen-year-old girl was lying on the floor, unconscious and not breathing, because someone else's confrontation had turned into gunfire. And sometimes the most important question after a tragedy isn't who was supposed to be involved. It's who else was standing close enough to be hurt.