Salt Lake City NBC affiliate KSL marked the 15-year anniversary of a shooting at the Triad Center that started in the station’s lobby and ended with one woman dead.
On January 14, 1999 De-Kieu Duy walked into the KSL lobby and demanded to go into the station’s newsroom. When she couldn’t get in, she started shooting.
“She came right over straight to me and said, ‘I want to go into the newsroom,'” Colleen Mirci, a former KSL receptionist, recalled. “And she reached down in her jacket and pulled out a gun and pointed it at me.”
Advertisement[KSL employee Brent] Wightman saw that and started yelling at the shooter. That’s when she pointed the gun at him and fired.“She grazed me right here,” he said. “I spun around and fell down. I still don’t know why.”
But Duy wasn’t finished.
“She stood over me and shot me twice more,” Wightman said.
Miraculously, he didn’t suffer any major injuries; all the bullets somehow grazed him.
Marc Giauque, a KSL Newsradio reporter, remembers hearing someone yelling about a gunman in the lobby, and he instinctively grabbed his audio recorder to cover it.
She came right over straight to me and said, ‘I want to go into the newsroom. And she reached down in her jacket and pulled out a gun and pointed it at me.’–Colleen Mirci, a former KSL receptionist“I got to about here in the hallway,” he said, “and I heard ‘pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop,’ and I realized this was not the place to be.”
Police soon arrived and helped evacuate everyone from the building. Unfortunately, a woman named Anne Sleater, an AT&T employee stationed in the building, was shot and later died from her injuries. She had recently returned to work from maternity leave.
“My heart still goes out to Anne Sleater’s family, and her friends and her co-workers,” Giauque said.
After Duy was arrested and people were allowed back inside the building, KSL TV chief editor Bob Brown found several bullet holes in the wall.
“She couldn’t get through the door,” he said, “so she shot through the door several times.”
One bullet went through a videotape, which Brown still has. He said he keeps it as a reminder of what happened on that awful day.
“It’s one of those things where I can remember it like it happened yesterday,” he said.
To this day, Duy has not faced charges for the shootings, or for the death of Anne Sleater. She is still in a mental health-type facility and has not been found competent to stand trial.
As for KSL, the shooting brought about a lot of security changes at Broadcast House. A wall with bullet-proof glass was built in front of the receptionist desk, and getting into the newsroom now requires passage through three security doors.