She went to the mall twice that afternoon. The first time she shopped for Halloween things at a party store and did a workout at the fitness club. Then she went back out to her Datsun B-210 in the parking lot, changed into green military fatigues, and took out the rifle.
The first man she fired at was about thirty yards away and she missed him. He saw which car she had come from and let one of its tires down so she could not drive away. She fired at a woman using a cash machine and missed her too.
Recife Cosmen was two, waiting in line with his parents outside the Magic Pan restaurant. She was barely aiming, firing from the hip, and she hit him in the chest. He died later. Two other children with him were hit, a nine-year-old girl in the cheek and a ten-year-old with a graze to the chest. Inside the mall she fired into some stores and passed others by. She shot Dr. Ernest Trout, sixty-seven, a gynecologist, in front of a store; he fell into a coma and died a month later. Augusto Ferrara, sixty-four, was shot and killed as he walked out of a shoe store. Both men were found by their wives, who had been shopping separately. Seven people were wounded in all, and she fired around two dozen rounds.
John Laufer was twenty-four, a graduate student and a volunteer fireman with the Lima company, and he was in the mall when it started. She fired about five shots directly at him and hit none of them. Like several other people in the mall, he thought she was firing blanks as a Halloween prank. He walked up to her as she tried to raise the rifle, took it, pushed her into a store, and held her there until a security guard came. She did not want to give it up.
The first guard to arrive asked her why she had done it. She said: "My family makes me nervous." As she was arrested she cursed her parents and said, "You should have killed me on the spot." In custody she asked detectives how many people she had killed, complained that there were only two dead, and asked whether any of them were children.
Springfield's police chief said afterward that more people would have been shot without Laufer. He had already applied to the state police academy before that day and was graded forty-ninth out of two thousand applicants; the attention brought his acceptance forward and he was sworn in as a trooper the following year. In 2013 he became chief of police at Coatesville, and in 2019 he was named law enforcement officer of the year.
Sylvia Wynanda Seegrist was born in 1960 in Alameda County, California; her birthday is given as July 3 in some accounts and July 31 in others. She was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia at fifteen or sixteen, the accounts again differing by a year, and between 1976 and 1985 she was hospitalized fifteen times. Each time she was discharged, psychiatrists found she was no longer a danger to herself or anyone else. In the summer of 1981, while being treated at an outpatient clinic, she stabbed a woman counselor in the back with a paring knife; she was not charged and was sent to a rehabilitation program instead. She once choked her mother, Ruth, and her mother once found a gun in her room, which Sylvia said she had meant to use on both her parents and herself. "Someday before I kill myself," she told her mother, "I'll bring some people down with me."
She enlisted in the Army in 1984, was harassed by her drill sergeant and others in her platoon, and was discharged after two months, early in 1985, because of her illness. She lived in Crum Lynne and spent a great deal of time at the Springfield Mall, where she harassed customers, talked admiringly of mass shootings such as the 1984 massacre at a McDonald's in San Ysidro, and wore combat fatigues in imitation of its gunman, James Huberty. The merchants called her Ms. Rambo, which she hated. She complained in the clothing stores that the colors were too bright. An instructor at the fitness club said she hated everyone and often talked about shooting people. She was afraid her medication was being used against her by her mother and her doctors, and hid the tablets rather than take them.
Clerks at a Kmart in neighboring Clifton Heights found her so unsettling that they told her they had no rifles in stock. She bought a Ruger 10/22 somewhere else. Pennsylvania in 1985 sold rifles on a signed paper form on which the buyer declared that he or she had never been committed to a mental institution. Seegrist signed it, which was a lie fifteen times over, and paid a hundred and seven dollars. A few hours before the shooting her mother begged her to commit herself voluntarily for treatment, and she refused.
She was sent to Norristown State Hospital for evaluation and on March 6, 1986 was found competent to stand trial on three counts of murder and seven of attempted murder. The trial was before Judge Frank Hazel and without a jury. Accounts differ on when it began, June 2 or June 18, 1986. The prosecutor, William H. Ryan Jr., argued she had planned the attack: she had joined a rifle club six months earlier, and on October 29, the day before the shooting, she had been to a lawyer and had her will drawn up. What she said to Laufer and to the guard was used the same way. The defense argued that she had been too ill to understand that what she was doing was wrong, and called her mother, who testified that Sylvia's paternal grandfather had fondled her and exposed himself to her when she was eight, something Ruth Seegrist did not learn of until her daughter was thirteen.
On June 27, 1986 Judge Hazel found her guilty but mentally ill. In Pennsylvania that is a conviction with treatment attached, not an acquittal, and the sentence was three consecutive life terms, one for each person killed, and seven consecutive ten-year terms, one for each person wounded. The judge said she should spend the rest of her life in some form of incarceration. In October 1987 relatives of the dead and several of the wounded filed a gross negligence suit against the mall's owners, Haverford State Hospital, the township police and others.
She spent her first two and a half years at Norristown State Hospital and was then moved to the State Correctional Institution at Muncy. Interviewed there in March 1991 by the Baltimore Sun, she said daily antipsychotic medication had quieted her delusions, and that the shooting had been driven by her fear that her mother was about to have her committed again and forced onto drugs that made her lose muscle control, damaged her eyesight and made her gain weight. She had decided, she said, that she would "rather die or go to prison than go to a mental hospital." "My crime came about because I dreaded the medication so much." She said she hoped one day to be released. The victims' families did not want her freed.
Her parents, by then divorced, visited her regularly at Muncy until about 1997, when she cut off contact with her family. The last letter Ruth Seegrist sent her was dated November 30, 1997, and it was never answered. In a 1999 letter to the New York Times Sylvia wrote that she was safer in prison than with her family. Her counselor there reported that she took her medication, used the library and exercised a great deal. As of the most recent reporting she remained at Muncy.
The case is why Pennsylvania has instant background checks. The signed-declaration system that let her buy the rifle stayed in place until 1998, when the state brought in the Pennsylvania Instant Check System and licensed dealers could verify a buyer by telephone. The shooting also drove a long argument in the state about when someone can be committed against their will, and a legislative task force was formed on care for the mentally ill. After the Sandy Hook shooting in 2012 Ruth Seegrist told Philadelphia magazine that it was ironic the law expected irrational people to seek help on their own, and that it had gone from one extreme to the other.