'I will not live in fear': Shoppers pack Market Mall for Black Friday sale despite stabbing incident

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In mid-August, gunfire in the parking lot outside Market Mall’s south entrance in broad daylight killed one man and sent shoppers scrambling for safety.

More than three months later, this past Friday, three people were taken to hospital following a “targeted” stabbing near the east entrance of the mall. Hours after the incident, multiple people were stabbed at CrossIron Mills mall near Balzac.

The stabbings came less than two weeks after the city had been rocked by five shootings in five days.

In spite of these events, Christine Grotefeld and Christine McNamara won’t allow themselves to feel unsafe. The day after the latest stabbing, both friends were seated near the east entrance of Market Mall, where cars rolled in and out of a packed parking lot.

“Market Mall is my home mall!” Grotefeld said. “It’s a very family-friendly mall.”

She said she was shocked when she heard about Friday’s stabbing, which police said sprung out of an altercation between two rival groups.

Grotefeld condemned the people involved in the fight. “This is bad behaviour,” she said.

“Absolutely bad behaviour,” McNamara chimed in. “These two groups that had an issue with each other, instead of fighting it out in a mall with weapons and stabbing each other seriously, they have to figure out a way to negotiate.”

Nor does Grotefeld buy Calgary Police Service Staff Sgt. Lon Brewster’s statement, which appeared to normalize the incident, saying such crimes happen in “large cities.”

“I disagree,” Grotefeld said. “I don’t expect this kind of thing to happen just because the city is big — that’s no excuse.”

Yet, the two were in the mall, seated near the scene of the stabbing.

“I will not live in fear because of their actions yesterday,” McNamara said.

‘Things happen all the time here’

In front of them was Aaron Bunes, who was feeding milk to his four-month-old daughter. He wasn’t aware of the stabbing until a reporter told him about it. Even if he had known about the incident, he said he wouldn’t have changed his mind about going to the mall.

“Personally, growing up in England, there was a lot more knife crime out there,” he said. “So, for me, it’s not a big issue.

“For me, the fact it’s targeted versus a random (attack) makes me feel a bit better about that.”

But a few stores down, Amanda Aronik, a sales associate at Body Shop, felt differently.

Aronik was in the shop during the stabbing. She didn’t see the fight unfold, but when she saw blood on the floor, she became nervous.

“I didn’t know what was going on,” Aronik said.

The difference with her situation was that she couldn’t simply leave the store. But she said, sadly, she has grown used to hearing about violence.

“Things happen all the time here,” she said. “You just gotta move on.”

Communicating with the public important: criminologist

A security guard, who didn’t wish to be named, told Postmedia — while pointing to two guards making rounds nearby — that the mall had increased security presence during the Black Friday sale.

Calls to the CPS duty inspector went unanswered, as did requests to Cadillac Fairview for comment.

The police have said the public wasn’t at risk during the targeted stabbing. But Mount Royal University criminologist Doug King said the word “risk” doesn’t consider the psychological impact on those who witnessed the crime.

“You can’t say that the people who saw it weren’t impacted by it,” he said.

King added he’d like the police to be swift in releasing details that would let the public know about the nature of the crime.

Information, such as the age of the offenders, their ethnicity, how they were known to each other and whether the rival groups were tied to certain schools, would better allow the public to assess the risk to their safety for themselves.

He sympathizes with the dual responsibility of investigating the incident and communicating details with the public in a way that doesn’t harm those investigations, but King believes the police could be a little more transparent.

“X (formerly known as Twitter) is a way that they can control what’s being said, as opposed to responding to questions to the media,” King said. “I’d be a little bit more available to the media to answer questions.”