Giants radio voice Bob Papa was at Mall of America at time of fatal shooting Friday night
Signs around the Mall of America indicate that a lockdown is in progress after a shooting was reported Friday, Dec. 23, 2022 in Bloomington, Minn. A shooting sent the Mall of America into lockdown Friday evening, mall officials and police in suburban Minneapolis said. Credit: AP/Alex Kormann
MINNEAPOLIS — On Friday night, there was a shooting at a mall in Minneapolis adjacent to where the Giants were staying in Bloomington, Minnesota. A 19-year-old man was killed during an altercation at the Mall of America, the nation’s largest shopping and entertainment center, police said.
Bob Papa, the long-time radio play-by-play voice of the Giants, tweeted that he was at the mall at the time of the shooting. Papa and some Giants players safely left the mall without incident.
Giants executive vice president of communications Pat Hanlon issued this statement: “Several players and some others, like Papa, were in the mall that the time of the shooting. When the incident occurred, Jerry Meade and our security group sent out an alert to let people know there is an incident in the mall, to stay in hotel or shelter in place.
“For those in the mall, they were asked to text Jerry their location so those people could be retrieved by our security with assistance from Bloomington PD once it was safe to do so. All of our people were accounted for and returned to hotel within 20 minutes of being given the go ahead.”
On Friday night, Hanlon told The Associated Press, “Everyone is back in the hotel.”
At 10:27 Friday night, Papa tweeted: “Safely out of mall and back at hotel. Prayers to victim.”
Kimberly Jones covers the Giants for Newsday, a beat she first worked in the early 2000s before joining the YES Network to cover the Yankees. She worked for the NFL Network for more than a decade and has been heard semi-regularly on WFAN.
