American Dream Mall, NJ – Shooting Lockdown April 7th, 2022

And while no vacation is ever perfect. Ours taught our kids the importance of practicing lockdown drills and how to stay calm and think positive during stressful situations. On Thursday 4/7/22 shortly before 6pm Blake and I were exiting a roller coaster and the boys were about to board. We were told that the ride was closed and the ride attendants did not know the circumstances. Once exiting the ride we found out other rides closed as well. Thinking that it’s almost 6, maybe the decided time close the park early. Disappointing, but we rode everything and had a great time. Then we were told to quickly make our way to the front of the park and then redirected to the back of the park. We ran into 3 kids that came from the water park and their mom had run to the car to get something and they were separated. Oldest being a teenager. She had her mom on FaceTime and we didn’t know what was going on and told her mom that we would look after them until she could get to them. Sadly their mom witnessed the shooting incident and then ran all the way to the park. When we got to the back of the park no employees were there yet and people started running out the back door. People started screaming at them to shut the doors as we didn’t know what exactly was going on. Word started trickling though that a shooting occurred in the mall. It was unknown at the time if it was an active shooter situation or an isolated incident. We learned most of the information from looking at twitter post and local news sites. About 2 hours after being in lockdown, heavily armed police officers made their way to the back of the park where we were located and told us that the situation was under control and we would be escorted out momentarily. A little bit later we made our way to the front of the park and got cut off right as we were about to go up the escalator. They had to stop us and we would be the second group to be escorted to our vehicles. We had to wait another hour plus. Keeping in mind that this is the 2nd largest mall in America and we weren’t the only ones in the mall at the time of the shooting. Employees passed out candy to the kids and brought out as many chairs as they could and did their best to keep everyone calm and happy. It was eventually our turn to leave the park. We all funneled into 1 stair case and 2 escalators. It was a lot happening at once but it was a controlled chaos. When we got to the top of their stairs we were met with lots of heavily armed officers and escorted to another escalator to get to the parking deck. Once in the parking deck there were police cars and ambulances everywhere. We got in our car a little after 9pm. It was an experience we will never forget but we are very appreciative of all of the employees and the diligent law enforcement that got us all out of harms ways and provided us a safe exit to our cars. We told the kids not to remember this incident as the Nickelodeon Universe experience but to focus on all the fun they had and know that we were going to do everything to keep them safe. We went back to the mall the next day for the water park and they were happy to go back. We did find out the next day that the incident was an isolated incident between 2 people that knew each other. The latest information we had on the shooting victim was that he was shot in the chest twice and was in surgery.

Before we were in lockdown Isabella met a boy that wanted to ride rides with her and thankfully during the lockdown we were able to meet up with him and his family. Isabella enjoyed her time with him during the lockdown and they exchanged phone numbers in hopes to stay in touch.

We did our best to stay busy during the lockdown.

This was a very scary and emotional time for all of us. We are happy we were all safe and felt very well protected. The mall staff, security and all of the law enforcement did a fantastic job and we made sure the next day to let them know. We were also impressed the next day at the mall when we had to go to a couple of stores, the security was going around to all of the stores checking on employees and trying to make them feel as comfortable as possible.