A pregnant mother of four was killed in a store full of Halloween shoppers.

A Halloween store is a place of anticipation. Parents and children move through aisles stacked with costumes and decorations, gathering the pieces of a transformation they will wear for one night. On Friday evening, at the Spirit Halloween store inside Solano Town Center in Fairfield, California, that anticipation was shattered by gunfire. A pregnant mother of four was killed, and six other people were wounded, in what police have described as a targeted shooting involving a single suspect who fled before officers arrived .

The woman who died was identified as Constance Hages, thirty-one years old. Family members told authorities she was pregnant. She died at the scene from multiple gunshot wounds . Three male victims—a sixteen-year-old, a nineteen-year-old, and a thirty-two-year-old—were in critical condition. A twenty-three-year-old man was in critical but stable condition, and two other men, aged nineteen and forty-three, were treated and released . The wounded were not merely statistics; they were shoppers, people who had come to a seasonal store on a Friday night, caught in a moment of violence that no one had prepared for.

Witnesses described the chaos inside the store. Jocelyn Lopez Tabares, fifteen, was in the checkout line with her sister when the shots rang out. She initially mistook the sound for balloons popping. Her sister pulled her to the ground, and she began recording on her phone—not for social media, but for evidence, because she feared she might not survive. "I felt like I was going to die," she told the California Post. Her footage captured shoppers diving between clothing racks, scrambling for cover, a mother screaming for her injured son . Other shoppers forced open a security gate at the back of the store, crawling underneath to escape into the mall corridor .

Fairfield police stated that preliminary evidence pointed to a targeted incident involving one suspect. No arrests had been made as of Saturday, and authorities were reviewing video and other evidence to identify the person responsible . The FBI's Sacramento field office deployed its Evidence Response Team to assist with processing the scene, which spanned the sprawling retail space of what was once a Best Buy . The Solano Town Center remained open but canceled its scheduled trick-or-treating event, a small acknowledgment that something had changed .

Fairfield is a city of some 120,000 residents, located about halfway between Sacramento and San Francisco. It is not a place accustomed to this kind of violence. The police department's statement acknowledged the fear the shooting had created, particularly on a weekend filled with Halloween events. "We understand that an incident of this nature is frightening and deeply unsettling," the statement read. "We encourage everyone to remain vigilant, look out for one another, and report any suspicious activity" . The words are standard, but the sentiment behind them is not. A community had been shaken.

The investigation continues. The suspect remains at large. The motive, if it can be called that, is still unknown. What is known is that a woman who loved her children, who worked at San Francisco International Airport before her death, who was pregnant when she was killed, will not see another Halloween . Her four children will grow up without her. The other victims will recover, or they will not. The store will reopen, or it will not. The mall will continue, as malls do.

There is a particular cruelty in violence that visits a place of ordinary joy. A costume shop on a Friday night in October is not a battleground. It is a place where people go to become someone else for a few hours, to laugh, to take pictures, to be children or to watch their children be children. The shooting at Solano Town Center took that away from everyone who was there. It replaced anticipation with fear, and it left a family without a mother. The police will find the person responsible, or they will not. But the loss will remain, a wound in the shape of an ordinary evening that turned into something else entirely.

Image Disclaimer: This article's accompanying image was generated by AI and is not a photograph of the actual store or individuals involved.

Sources: New York Post, The Associated Press, The Korea Times, The News International, NT News, Daily Mail