On the evening of June 12, 2015, Andrea Jean Farrington, a 20-year-old female, was working at the Iowa Children's Museum kiosk in the Coral Ridge Mall in Coralville, Iowa. What had been a dream job for six months was about to come to a tragic and sudden end. Around 7:30 p.m., as the mall bustled with shoppers, a former mall security guard named Alexander Kozak approached her.
He was 22 years old and had been employed as a security guard at the mall since late 2014.
Kozak and Farrington had a complicated relationship, primarily existing through text messages that were sometimes flirtatious. However, Farrington had become troubled by Kozak's behavior, telling her cousin that he would stare at her at work and had left notes on her car. She had reported his harassment to mall authorities. The day before the shooting, Farrington had sent Kozak a text message to end their "sick and twisted something" of a relationship, which he later described to police. On the day of the incident, after she sent another message confirming the relationship was over, Kozak's actions turned fatal. Some reports indicated he had been fired from his security job earlier that same day.
Driven by a motive prosecutors would later describe as anger over the rejection, Kozak left the mall, went to his residence to retrieve a 9mm Glock, and returned with the intent to kill. He walked up to the kiosk where Farrington was working and shot her three times in the back. Shoppers and employees who witnessed the event rushed to her aid, but her injuries were too severe. Farrington was transported to a nearby hospital, where she was pronounced dead.
Alexander Kozak fled the scene in his car but was apprehended by state troopers on Interstate 80, about 50 miles from the mall, within an hour of the shooting. He immediately confessed to the crime, telling investigators that he had left the mall to get his gun and returned to shoot Farrington. He was arrested and charged with first-degree murder. During his trial in April 2016, his defense attorneys argued for a lesser charge, claiming Kozak had a mental defect and was incapable of premeditation. However, the prosecution presented evidence that the murder was deliberate, including texts Kozak had sent to another woman stating his intention to kill Farrington. The jury found Alexander Kozak guilty of first-degree murder, and he was subsequently sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
