Jodi Longmeyer saw the teenage gunman step off the mall elevator on the third floor, according to the recording. He was dressed in dark clothes. She saw his gun and watched him open fire. Then she hit the floor.

Robert A Hawkins’ rampage was over in six minutes. But Longmeyer agonised with an emergency operator for almost half hour while barricading herself in an employee locker room at the Von Maur store.

“I just saw someone up here in the locker room and she’s got a lot of blood on the floor,” Longmeyer told the emergency dispatcher in tapes released on Friday.

Minutes later, shaking and scared, Longmeyer, who is a human resources manager at Von Maur, locked herself into a security room where she watched live surveillance of the department store. “Oh my gosh,” she told the dispatcher. “It looks like the gun is lying over by customer service. It looks like he might have killed himself,” Longmeyer said as she started to cry.

“I had seen more than I wanted to see,” Longmeyer told NBC’s Today news show on Saturday, describing the call.