Gunman Kills Woman, Wounds Six at California Halloween Store

FAIRFIELD, CALIF. — A gunman opened fire inside a crowded Spirit Halloween store at a Solano County shopping mall on Friday night, killing a 31-year-old woman and wounding six other people in what police described as a targeted attack carried out by a single assailant who remained at large a day later.

The shooting took place shortly after 8:30 p.m. inside the Spirit Halloween outlet at Solano Town Center, an enclosed mall of more than 125 stores along Interstate 80 in Fairfield, a city of roughly 120,000 people about 45 miles northeast of San Francisco. Officers, firefighters and paramedics converged on the mall within minutes, and the Fairfield Police Department kept the store and surrounding corridor cordoned off as an active crime scene well past midnight.

Police identified the woman killed as Constance Hages, 31. Family members told investigators she was pregnant and the mother of four children; the Solano County Sheriff-Coroner's Office, which handles death investigations for the county, said it had not yet confirmed that detail or released an official cause of death. Fairfield is the seat of Solano County, a jurisdiction of roughly 450,000 residents stretched between the Sacramento and San Francisco Bay regions, and the shooting was quickly treated as a county-wide, multi-agency response rather than a routine city call.

Seven shot, one fatally

Of the seven people struck by gunfire, three remained in critical condition a day after the shooting: a 16-year-old boy and two men, ages 19 and 32. A 23-year-old man was hospitalized in critical but stable condition. Two other men, 19 and 43, were treated for gunshot wounds and released the same night. Fairfield Police Chief Dan Marshall said detectives believed the gunman had targeted one or more of the victims specifically, though he would not say which of the seven, and he declined to release a description of the shooter. "This is still a very active crime scene," Marshall told reporters outside the mall, and officers continued interviewing witnesses and reviewing store surveillance footage into Saturday.

No arrest had been announced as of early Sunday, and Fairfield police asked anyone with information to call its investigations line or email the department directly rather than approach the mall. Investigators have not said what, if any, relationship existed between the gunman and the people who were shot, or whether Hages was the intended target among the seven people struck.

A holiday crowd inside a costume shop

The store was busy with Halloween shoppers when the gunfire began, witnesses said. Javier Espinoza, who was browsing with his girlfriend, said he mistook the first shots for fireworks until the sound moved inside the store: "Then we started hearing them inside the store." He said the couple pried open a security fence with help from other shoppers and escaped through an emergency exit before a stranger waiting outside drove them to a relative's home. Meina Davis, who works at a shoe store in the mall and had stepped into Spirit Halloween with a coworker, said a second burst of gunfire sent shoppers running and a mother calling out for her child; she ducked under a rear security gate and hid in a neighboring store for roughly an hour.

"This is what Fairfield is looking like before Halloween," said Michelle Marie Anderson, a Fairfield resident who was dropping off her niece at the mall when the shooting unfolded, describing the scene of wounded shoppers and fleeing families outside the store.

Solano Town Center, built in 1981 and renamed from Solano Mall in 2012, is the largest enclosed shopping center in Solano County and a seasonal draw for costume shoppers from Fairfield, Vacaville and Suisun City in the final days before Halloween. Multiple agencies responded to Friday's shooting, including California Highway Patrol units that helped clear the building and officers from the neighboring city of Suisun City under a mutual-aid agreement.

The Spirit Halloween chain that operated the store is a seasonal retailer that typically opens more than 1,500 temporary locations across North America each fall, often in vacant big-box storefronts, and closes most of them within days of Halloween. The brief, high-traffic lifespan of those stores means they draw dense crowds of parents, teenagers and young children in the final shopping window before the holiday, a pattern that was underway at the Fairfield location when the gunfire began.

Officials respond, investigation widens

Rep. John Garamendi, whose district includes Fairfield, said in a statement that his office was monitoring the investigation and that he was "praying for the seven victims and their families," adding that local and federal investigators searching for the gunman "have my full and unwavering support." The FBI's Sacramento Field Office said it was aware of the shooting and assisting local police, though it had not taken over the investigation as of Saturday night.

Spirit Halloween, the national seasonal retailer that leases the Fairfield storefront, said in a statement that it was "deeply saddened by the tragic incident" and was cooperating with investigators. The company said the Fairfield location, along with a separate store in Madison Heights, Michigan, where a 21-year-old man was fatally shot the same night in what police described as an unrelated altercation between two acquaintances, would remain closed for the rest of the Halloween season. Michigan authorities said the suspect in that shooting, also 21, was hospitalized after being confronted by the victim's family at the scene and had not been formally charged as of Saturday; investigators in Fairfield and Madison Heights have said the two shootings do not appear to be connected.

What happens next

Fairfield detectives said they would not release further details about a suspect description or a possible motive while the investigation remained active, and they asked residents near the mall to report any suspicious activity. The Solano County Sheriff-Coroner's Office said it expected to complete an autopsy and confirm Hages's cause of death and pregnancy status in the coming days, a step that could also bear on whether prosecutors ultimately pursue additional charges tied to a fetal death once a suspect is identified. No court filings had been made public by Sunday morning, since no suspect had been named or taken into custody.

Mall management had not said when the Spirit Halloween storefront itself might reopen, though the rest of Solano Town Center remained open for business over the weekend. The four victims still hospitalized had not been publicly identified beyond their ages, and police had released no update on their conditions beyond Saturday's count.

Because no suspect has been named, no case has yet been filed in Solano County Superior Court. Detectives said the surveillance footage from inside and outside the store, along with interviews with the dozens of shoppers and employees who were present, would likely shape the next phase of the inquiry.