Carry Everywhere: Woman Shot After Kidnapping, Slashing Toddler in Omaha Walmart

It’s basically every parent’s greatest fear. You’re in a public place when, out of the blue, someone threatens your child. That’s what happened to an Omaha woman who was shopping with her three-year-old when a deranged woman approached them brandishing a large knife.

From the OPD’s Facebook page . . .

Investigators later determined through store surveillance footage that [Noemi] Guzman had shoplifted the knife from inside the store. She then approached the child and guardian in a shopping aisle, brandished the knife, and forced the guardian to walk ahead of the cart while the child remained inside. Ms. Guzman directed them through the store and into the parking lot. Officers arrived shortly after Ms. Guzman, the guardian, and child exited the store and began walking east toward the parking lot entrance.

The officers told Guzman to drop the knife. When refused and slashed the child’s face, they opened fire. Guzman died at the scene.

Multiple reports indicate that Guzman’s had exhibited violent behavior before. In March of 2024, she allegedly sprayed lighter fluid on her father earlier and threatened to set him on fire. She was then arrested after breaking into a church rectory, starting a fire and threatening a priest with a knife.

A judge later found her not responsible for this felonies due to insanity and, inexplicably, allowed her back on the streets while she got treatment. Fortunately, the child in this case will be fine after receiving treatment for his wounds, but this could have gone very differently. All because an insane, violent person wasn’t locked up either in prison or in a padded cell.

We live in a world where the criminal justice system, in far too many places, gives the benefit of the doubt to criminals and the mentally ill without taking into account the threat these people pose to general population. Judges and prosecutors seem to believe that letting these people walk until they do something that results in their being executed by responding police is the equitable way to run a society.

As for what the average citizen can do, that seems self-evident. If the mother in this case had been armed, it’s possible that the situation would never have gotten as far as it did and the child wouldn’t have been injured. The lesson: carry a firearm. Daily. Even for a trip to Walmart.

Threats don’t announce themselves in advance and too often the perpetrators have done it before — repeatedly — enabled all along by people whose job it supposedly is to protect the community. Don’t let yourself or you family be victimized by someone a judge has decided needed another chance to turn their life around…all evidence to the contrary.