Around the country this week, people felt shock and sorrow when they learned that a gunman had killed eight holiday shoppers and himself at a mall in Omaha, Neb.

In Clayton, Carol King felt the news hit more directly. It came as close as the bullet lodged in her right shoulder.

For 35 years, she has had a bullet there, a lasting link to one of the nation's first public shootings. It happened on Memorial Day 1972 when a gunman opened fire in the parking lot of Raleigh's North Hills Mall.

It was a time when such mass shootings were all but unheard of, when such scenarios were unimaginable.

Back then, King was Carol Ann Homovec, a 20-year-old Sanderson High School graduate working at Crawford & Co. Insurance across the street from the mall.

On the day of the shooting, she had decided to walk to her parents' home for lunch on the other side of Lassiter Mill Road.

She was walking through the parking lot when she heard what she thought were firecrackers. She had no idea what was going on until she felt something hit her shoulder. She had the sensation of warm water rushing down her back.

It was blood.

King later learned that a man named Harvey McLeod had positioned himself between two cars in the parking lot and, raising up periodically, had methodically fired at a dozen or more people.

Three people were killed and eight were injured, including two little girls, before the gunman killed himself.

"It was just so shocking," King said. "People couldn't believe it was happening. They couldn't make sense of it."

Two weeks earlier, there had been an assassination attempt on Alabama Gov. George Wallace in a Maryland mall parking lot. And at first, Raleigh residents feared U.S. Sen. B. Everett Jordan was the target at North Hills; he happened to be campaigning there that day.

But in the end, the true explanation was more terrifying. This shooting was purely, frighteningly random.

Political consultant Gary Pearce, then a reporter who helped cover the scene for The N&O, said it shook the city to its core.

"That was a different world and a different time," Pearce said. "Your mind wasn't wired to think of random shootings. There were no security guards, no signs up telling people not to carry a gun."

Neither were there modern databases. Pearce's story in the next day's paper was about how the shooter had purchased his gun the morning of the shooting after answering five questions about his background.

Although North Hills didn't have a security force, it did have its own chaplain, who prayed over the wounded and soothed the bereaved.

At this point, King noted, we are all too familiar with scenes like the one at North Hills on May 29, 1972. We have seen them play out in our schools, at the post office, on a college campus -- and again this week, at a busy shopping mall.

King said she finds it sad that her son's high school has installed security cameras and is putting up a fence to keep the insiders in and the outsiders out.

"The world has gotten a lot scarier," she said.

She carries the proof in a shattered right shoulder blade and a bullet there.