Salt Lake City police have finished their exhaustive investigation into the shooting rampage at Trolley Square, finding no real motive for 18-year-old Sulejman Talovic's killing spree.

"I think it may have died with him," Salt Lake City Police Chief Chris Burbank said in an interview Sunday with the Deseret Morning News.

The report itself will not be made public for now, Burbank said. It will be used as part of the prosecution of four men charged in connection with the guns Talovic used to kill five people and wound four others inside the downtown Salt Lake City shopping mall on Feb. 12. Talovic died in a shootout with police.

However, Burbank said the report does not provide much more than has already been made public. The chief said that toxicology tests conducted during Talovic's autopsy revealed he was not on any drugs at the time of the murder spree.

Since the shooting, police have tried to learn everything they can about Talovic's life and what may have prompted him to kill on a massive scale. They tried to build a profile, based upon interviews with those who knew him. They examined the guns, his relationships, his life history in the United States and his native Bosnia.

All of that yielded nothing.

"It's a hard one for even the detectives to come to grips with," the chief said. "There just isn't any indicators of why he did what he did."

The only thing Burbank can theorize is that Talovic's violent childhood in war-torn Bosnia and his inability to assimilate into life in the United States somehow prompted him to kill.

"I think he had seen a lot of situations where human life had been devalued, and that's exactly the attitude it appears he had when he walked into Trolley Square," he said.

A child of war

Talovic spent part of his childhood in war-ravaged Bosnia, hiding in the mountains and moving from village to village, trying to hide from Serb forces that were killing Bosnian Muslims. It was a horrible war that resulted in the slaughter of thousands.

When he emigrated to the United States in 1998 at age 10, teachers and friends say, he was a "nice boy" who struggled desperately to fit in. He struggled with English, he struggled in school. Some say he was violent, lashing out and hurting other children, even earning himself a juvenile record.

In 2004, Talovic dropped out of school to begin working. He did construction for a while. A few weeks before the shooting, he landed a job at Aramark Uniform Services, where he would roll up freshly laundered floor mats for businesses. Co-workers said he would keep his head down, do his job, and leave.

Burbank said Talovic's life history may have built up to the Trolley Square killings.

"Being pulled out of his country to come here, very hard I would think, to be taken from your country in those circumstances and left in a completely new society, new language and everything else and especially at his age," the chief said. "And then having to assimilate into our culture, which unfortunately at times tend to devalue human life."

Those closest to Talovic have said they saw no signs of the massacre coming.

His father, Suljo Talovic, told the Deseret Morning News in May he still had no motive for the massacre.

A 17-year-old Texas girl named Monika spent hours speaking to Talovic over the phone. Their lengthy conversations grew into a sort-of "relationship." The night before the massacre, he told her she'd be mad at him the next day.

"And I was like, 'So what does it involve?' He goes, 'It involves everything but you,"' she said in a March interview.

Charges pending

On Feb. 12, Sulejman Talovic stepped out of his car at the mall's parking terrace armed with a pistol-grip shotgun, a .38-caliber handgun, a backpack full of ammunition and a bandolier of shotgun shells around his waist.

Salt Lake City police said he first killed Jeffrey Walker, 52, and wounded his 16-year-old son Alan "AJ" Walker. Outside the mall's west doors, he wounded Shawn Munns, 34.

Moving inside the mall, Talovic killed Vanessa Quinn, 29, outside Bath and Body Works. Inside the Cabin Fever card and novelty shop, he killed Teresa Ellis, 29; Brad Frantz, 24; and Kirsten Hinckley, 15. Hinckley's mother, Carolyn Tuft, 44, was wounded. So was Stacy Hanson, 53.

Burbank has told the Deseret Morning News the shootings lasted about three minutes before Talovic encountered off-duty Ogden police officer Ken Hammond, who was on an early Valentine's Day date with his wife. Hammond got into a shootout with Talovic until Salt Lake City police officers raced inside the mall, cornering Talovic inside the Pottery Barn Kids store where he was killed.

In May, a federal grand jury indicted four men on charges related to the guns that Talovic used in his killing spree. One worked with Talovic at a construction job last year.

Mackenzie Glade Hunter, 19, was recently arrested on a charge that he violated the terms of his pretrial release and is back in the Salt Lake County Jail. A grand jury indictment said Talovic approached Hunter, who contacted Brenden Taylor Brown, 20. Both men arranged to sell Talovic the .38 Special handgun used in the Trolley Square killings.

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The handgun was originally reported stolen in Wyoming. Matthew Hautala, 20, is accused of lying to FBI agents about how the gun ultimately made its way to Hunter.

Hautala, Hunter and Brown are scheduled to go on trial in a Salt Lake City federal court on Nov. 5. Brown's lawyer has filed notice with the court suggesting he may be open to plea negotiations with federal prosecutors.

A Nov. 26 trial is pending for Westley Wayne Hill, 38, accused of illegally selling the pistol grip shotgun to Talovic at a West Valley City pawn shop. Hill's defense attorney has filed court papers seeking to have a charge of unlawful transfer of a firearm dismissed.


E-mail: bwinslow@desnews.com

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