Paranoid Schizphrenic, Sylvia Seegrist, killed three innocent people at the Springfield, Pa., mall

Long before the bullets started flying, everyone knew something was very wrong with Sylvia Seegrist.

Acquaintances said she was always angry and nicknamed her “Ms. Rambo.”

Even her mother was terrified. In July 1985, Ruth Seegrist wrote an article for a Pennsylvania paper, the Springfield Press, about life with her paranoid schizophrenic 25-year-old daughter. She had pleaded for years to keep her child locked up, but to no avail. “What do you need? Blood on the floor?” she wrote.

Four months later, this mother’s worst nightmare came true.

Around 4 p.m. on Wednesday, Oct. 30, 1985, Sylvia Seegrist, dressed in Army fatigues and black boots, parked her car at the front of the Springfield Mall, stepped out and started shooting. Bullets from her .22 semi-automatic rifle missed her first targets — a woman at an ATM and a man walking in the lot.

A group of children standing outside the Magic Pan restaurant were not so lucky. A bullet tore into the tiny chest of Recife Cosmen, 2, hitting him in the heart. His two cousins, Tiffany Wootson, 10, and Kareen Wootson, 9, were also shot, but they would recover from their wounds.

From there, Seegrist dashed into the mall.

People first thought that the pop, pop, pop of the rifle was part of a marketing or Halloween stunt, since the holiday was just a day away.

But then they saw blood on the floor and heard screams. Shoppers scrambled for cover in jewelry vaults, dressing rooms, back offices, any place that would put them out of the gunwoman’s sight.

Seegrist continued, swinging the rifle, shooting wildly, randomly, into groups in front of the restaurants and stores. It took all of five minutes for her to get off 15 shots, wounding 10, three fatally. In addition to Cosmen, Augusto Ferrara, 64, died on the spot, Another shopper, Dr. Ernest Trout, 67, suffered wounds to his head, abdomen and buttocks. He died a few days later at the hospital.

The shooting might have gone on, had it not been for a graduate student, Jack Laufer, out on a date with a new girlfriend, Victoria Loring, both 24 and EMTs for the local fire department.

Laufer saw a woman in fatigues, shooting a rifle, and jumped to the conclusion it was all a Halloween prank. He didn’t think it was funny.

Seegrist took aim at him, but Laufer simply walked up to her and wrestled the gun from her grip. He turned her over to police, and then the unassuming hero rushed, with his girlfriend, to help the wounded.

At her arraignment, Seegrist snarled at the judge: “Hurry up, man, you know I’m guilty. Kill me on the spot.” Instead, she was locked up in Delaware County Prison.

In the days that followed, reporters had no trouble finding people to offer details about the shooter’s odd life. Everyone who had even brushed by Seegrist had a bizarre tale to tell. She glared at people, one man recalled, with a face like a “demon possessed,” shrieked curses and ranted about nuclear war and how the world was against her. She raked leaves at 4 in the morning, drank furniture polish, sat in a steam room in Army fatigues, and marched up and down the staircase in her apartment building. The manager of a Springfield Mall drugstore where she picked up her meds had given her the nickname “Ms. Rambo.”

When early reports came out that a woman had shot up a mall, no one who knew her had the slightest doubt about the identity of the killer.

For the first few years of Seegrist’s life, such violence would have seemed unimaginable. She had been a bright, happy child until about age 13, when something went terribly wrong. Her mother said the decline started after the girl said her grandfather had molested her. By 15, Seegrist was smoking pot and having sex with neighborhood boys.

Soon after, she was diagnosed with schizophrenia, and committed for the first of a dozen stays in mental health facilities. But her commitments were brief because of laws, drafted to protect the rights of the mentally ill, that made it difficult to lock her up against her will.

She remained free, even after she stabbed a guidance counselor, tried to strangle her mother, and talked constantly about killing people.

Drugs to help her condition made her sick, and she refused to take them.

Despite increasingly violent acts and fantasies, she somehow managed to get a gun.

On March 22, 1985, she tried to purchase a rifle at a K-Mart, but clerks there took one look at her military attire and weird behavior and sent her away unarmed.

A week later, in a different department store, she filled out all the required forms, including one that asked if she had ever been mentally ill or in trouble with the law. She lied, and walked out with the rifle she would use seven months later in the Springfield Mall.

In June 1986, a jury found Seegrist guilty but mentally ill. Her sentence: Three consecutive life terms, plus 10- to 20-year concurrent sentences for the seven wounded. At long last, someone had answered Ruth Seegrist’s prayers. The judge ensured that her dangerous daughter would never again be free.

Today, Ms. Rambo remains behind bars, her name popping up every so often, a historical footnote on those awful occasions when a madman grabs a gun and goes on a rampage.