“I’m begging you as a mother, if she comes in, please don’t sell her a gun.”

From the conference room at her office, Delana began working the phone, looking for help to block her daughter’s gun buy.

It was Monday.

As Delana said in her deposition, a Lafayette County sheriff’s deputy recommended calling the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. ATF referred her to the FBI. And the FBI told her that it could take six weeks or more for the agency to review medical records submitted by her daughter’s psychiatrist. Delana said she was told there were no guarantees that the bureau could prevent Weathers from buying a gun.

Just before 9 a.m., Delana called Odessa Gun & Pawn directly.

She gave the store manager her daughter’s name, birth date and Social Security number. She told him that Weathers would probably try to buy another gun after getting her disability payment. She asked him to post the information on a sticky note on the cash register to alert other employees about her daughter.

Dady, the manager, thought that the call was “odd” and that he didn’t get calls like that every day, he said at a deposition.

He listened, noncommittal, Delana said, and after four minutes the call ended.

Two days later, on the Wednesday morning of June 27, 2012, Tex Delana and Justin, Weathers’s brother, planned to mow their lawn, a slope so steep it required using a rope to pull the mower up and down.

He went out to buy ice and picked up a candy bar for his pair of grown kids. When he got home, the temperature was close to 100 degrees and the mowing was put off.

Tex Delana went inside, sat down at his computer and pulled up photos of fishing boats.

‘Just as normal as you and me’

Sometime before 11 a.m., Weathers walked into the gun shop wearing a red sundress with brown flowers, her blond hair in a ponytail. Dady asked her how the first gun had worked out, as he later told police. She’d sold it, Weathers told him, but she seemed “nervous and in a hurry,” Dady would recall.

Bill Cook, a store clerk, was cleaning guns behind the glass display counter where hunting rifles and shotguns are mounted row upon row. He remembers the encounter differently.

“She was normal. Just as normal as you and me,” he said in a recent interview as he stood packing black handgun cases for a gun show in Kansas City.