On Monday, Nichole Gaskins was at her job, running a cash register at the Kmart at the Cedarbrook Mall, perhaps daydreaming about becoming a journalist.
Yesterday, she was in the hospital, breathing with a ventilator. Doctors are waiting to see whether a bullet that pierced her neck has left her paralyzed.
In what appears to be an extraordinarily random act of violence, Gaskins was shot several times Tuesday as she frantically tried to bolt inside to escape a gunman on her doorstep.
She did not. She was gunned down to the green carpet of her foyer at age 21.
Police say she was the last of four people shot and wounded by Casey Dooley, 21, as he scurried across the city toting 9mm and .45-caliber pistols. He was arrested shortly after shooting Gaskins, when he rammed his car into a police cruiser while fleeing, authorities said.
Gaskins' mother, Regina, sat on the family's porch yesterday and tried to make sense of it all.
"This is the type of thing you see happen to somebody else - never in your own family," said Regina Gaskins, an early-childhood instructor at a West Philadelphia school.
Dooley, of the 900 block of East Price Street in East Germantown, was in prison yesterday after his bail was set at $8 million - with $1 million in bail imposed for each person wounded, as well as for each of four other people he allegedly shot at or threatened with the pistols.
Prosecutors charged him with eight counts each of attempted murder, aggravated assault, simple assault, making terroristic threats, and weapons offenses.
Detectives continued to try to establish a motive for Tuesday's rampage. It was a half-hour burst of violence in which, police say, Dooley - acting in a weirdly deliberate fashion - stopped at three locations and shot four people whom he had apparently never met.
"There is absolutely no connection between any of the victims," one investigator said. "No one knew him."
Police said a search of Dooley's car found a notebook containing pages filled with violent ramblings.
Dooley himself has explained little. Investigators said he refused to make a statement after his arrest and instead stared coolly at the walls of the interview room. At one point, they said, he told investigators: "I don't talk to badges."
