Larissa Starchenko, left, an employee who was inside the Von Maur store when a gunman opened fire, is comforted by her daughter, Yara, Wednesday in Omaha, Neb. Police locked down the Westroads Mall in Omaha after nine people, including the gunman, were shot dead Wednesday afternoon.

Bellevue, Neb. ? Robert Hawkins had a history of depression but seemed to be doing better since moving in with a friend’s family just over a year ago.

But about two weeks ago he broke up with his longtime girlfriend, and this week he was fired from his job at a fast food restaurant, said a woman whose family took Hawkins in.

On Wednesday, the suspect killed eight people and himself in a shooting rampage at an Omaha shopping mall.

Surgical nurse Debora Maruca-Kovac, whose family took in Hawkins after her 17- and 19-year-old sons befriended him, told The Associated Press that she and her husband let Hawkins stay with them after he was kicked out of his family’s house but would not say why his family had kicked him out.

“He was depressed, and he had always been depressed,” Maruca-Kovac said. “But he looked like he was getting better.”

Hawkins, who earned a GED after dropping out of Papillion-La Vista High School, got a driver’s license after moving in with the Maruca-Kovacs and five months ago started working at a McDonald’s restaurant near their home in a middle-class neighborhood, Maruca-Kovac said.

Maruca-Kovac, a surgical nurse at Nebraska Medical Center, said she was getting ready for work Wednesday when Hawkins phoned her about 1 p.m., telling her he had left a note for her in his bedroom. She tried to get him to explain, but he hung up, she said.

Maruca-Kovac said she found the handwritten note on the floor by his bed.

In the note, Maruca-Kovac said, Hawkins said “how sorry he was for everything.” He wrote that he loved his mom and dad and other family members and said he wasn’t “going to be a burden anymore.”