Christmas Day in Gainesville, Florida, carried the strange quiet that sometimes settles over American towns once the morning gifts are opened and the streets grow still. At a Walgreens on the corner of Northwest 13th Street and 39th Avenue, the parking lot should have been ordinary—just a few last-minute shoppers picking up medicine, snacks, or forgotten holiday items.

Instead, a security camera captured the moment everything shattered.

A woman stepped from a vehicle, raised a handgun, and opened fire.

 

 

 

Within seconds, two people were shot. One of them would die there in the parking lot. The other would fight for his life.

Moments later, the same camera caught the woman again as she ran back to her vehicle and sped away. But her escape was short-lived. A police officer working a traffic crash nearby heard the chaos unfold over the radio and spotted the fleeing car almost immediately. Without hesitation, he pulled out and gave chase, lights flashing as the pursuit tore through the streets of Gainesville.

Back at the Walgreens, patrol cars began arriving from every direction. Officers rushed toward the victims lying in the parking lot.

 

 

 

 

One of the wounded men struggled to speak as they tried to help him.

“Who shot you?” an officer asked.

The man winced, breathing hard. “Amanda Jensen,” he said.

“Amanda who?”

“Jensen. Amanda Jensen.”

“Why’d she shoot you?”

The man tried to gather himself. “I’m picking up my daughter.”

The officers exchanged quick looks.

Later they would learn the full weight of what he meant.

 

 

The man told police that the woman who had just shot him was the mother of his infant daughter. The shooting had happened during a custody exchange on Christmas Day. The woman who died in the parking lot, thirty-one-year-old Anna Terrell, had been with him when the gunfire started.

Across town, the chase was reaching its end.

Police vehicles boxed in the fleeing car, forcing it to stop. Officers jumped out with weapons drawn.

“Show me your hands!”

“Show me your hands! Get out of the car!”

“Hands up! Now!”

Inside the vehicle, a woman’s voice called out.

“My kids are in the car.”

She opened the door slowly but hesitated.

“Come here,” she said, her voice trembling. “Let me hug them.”

“No,” an officer shouted back. “Get out of the car now.”

Another officer warned the others. “Watch your crossfire.”

The woman still looked back toward the rear seats.

“My kids…”

Officers quickly realized the situation was even more complicated than they expected. Several small children were inside the vehicle.

“There’s kids in the car,” one officer said urgently.

“Driver’s out and prone down,” another radioed.

The woman was ordered onto the pavement. She slowly lay face-down on the asphalt as officers moved in and handcuffed her.

Investigators would soon identify her as thirty-eight-year-old Amanda Janszen.

In the back of the car were five children. One of them was only eleven months old.

“Keep crawling,” an officer instructed as they secured her.

Another officer approached the car carefully, checking on the children.

“How old are these kids?” he asked.

“Eleven months,” Amanda said. “Four.”

“How many more in there?”

“Two more… seven… seventeen… ten… fourteen.”

Officers carefully began removing the children from the vehicle and making sure they were safe.

Not far from the car, another officer spotted a handgun lying on the ground.

“Good job staying with it,” one officer told the one who had pursued her. “You could have lost her and none of this would have been solved.”

He glanced toward the children.

“I know that was stressful as hell,” he added quietly. “But right now everyone’s okay. The kids are okay.”

Meanwhile, back at the Walgreens parking lot, investigators were still trying to understand exactly what had happened.

“We’ve got a double shooting,” one officer reported over the radio. “Male and female victims. The male’s already been transported. Female’s still on the ground. CPR’s been going for about ten minutes.”

Another officer relayed what little they knew so far.

“Dispatch said something about a custody exchange,” he said. “The guy claimed she wasn’t going to turn over the kid. Said he thought the other guy was a child molester, but that’s just what he said before he was taken to the hospital.”

Witnesses began approaching officers, still shaken by what they had seen.

One man explained that he had been in his truck in the parking lot.

“I was getting ready to go inside to use the bathroom,” he said. “Then I heard yelling. Next thing I know—bang. I thought somebody was getting shot, so I said I’m getting the hell out of here.”

He described trying to reverse his large truck to leave.

“But the truck’s so big I couldn’t get out fast enough,” he said. “Then another vehicle slammed into us trying to get through. All this chaos—and that car was just a little Kia.”

Officers continued questioning witnesses while the investigation unfolded.

 

 

 

They soon determined that Amanda Janszen had allegedly fired three shots at each victim before speeding away from the scene and leading police on a thirteen-mile pursuit.

When officers searched her, they found additional ammunition magazines in her pockets.

More witnesses came forward with pieces of the story.

One man recalled hearing the first shots while he was walking toward the store.

“I heard a pop,” he said. “I thought maybe a car backfired. Then I looked over and saw smoke and realized those were gunshots.”

He described running toward the building and seeing the wounded man.

“He was bleeding and pointing toward the car next to his,” the witness said. “Then there were more shots. Pow, pow, pow.”

Another witness said he saw the woman fire again after the victims were already down.

“All I could hear him saying was, ‘I’m just trying to get my kid,’” the man told police quietly.

Back near the suspect vehicle, officers were still processing the scene and collecting evidence.

“One spent casing here,” an investigator said, pointing toward the pavement.

“How many total?”

“I’ve got five.”

“That matches what the witness said—five shots.”

They continued examining the area, reconstructing the violent moments that had unfolded only minutes earlier.

Inside a patrol car, Amanda sat quietly in handcuffs.

At one point she spoke softly.

“I thought he was going to take my child,” she said. “I couldn’t take it anymore.”

An officer nearby responded carefully.

“I’m not asking you questions right now,” he said. “But your kids are safe. None of them are hurt.”

She nodded weakly.

“Water, please,” she said.

An officer handed her a bottle and a few tissues.

While detectives continued investigating the scene, the surviving victim was being treated at a nearby hospital. Eventually a detective arrived to speak with him.

“Can you walk me through what happened?” the detective asked.

The man nodded slowly.

“There’s a court order,” he explained. “Fifty-fifty custody. We were supposed to do the exchange on Christmas Day.”

He said they had agreed to meet near the Walgreens, but Amanda had initially been parked nearby at a CVS.

“We saw her sitting there,” he said. “Then we drove over. She pulled behind us and made a U-turn.”

He described how they pulled into the lot.

“My friend was driving,” he continued. “She parked next to Amanda’s car. Amanda drove off for a minute and then came back.”

The victim said he stepped out of the car, confused about what was happening.

“She got out and asked who was in the car with me,” he said. “I told her it was my ride.”

Amanda kept approaching.

“She kept asking who was in the car,” he said.

Then everything exploded.

“She pulled out the gun,” he said quietly. “It looked like she shot my friend in the head.”

He described diving back toward the car.

“I jumped in through the passenger side and tried to crawl to the back seat,” he said. “I got shot in the arm first. Then two more times—once in the back and once in the leg.”

The detective listened carefully.

“What was she saying?” he asked.

“She kept yelling, ‘You made this happen. You made this happen.’”

The victim paused for a long moment.

“She thought I was cheating,” he added finally. “She read messages between me and my best friend. She doesn’t believe a man and a woman can just be friends.”

The detective sighed quietly.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

Later that night, officers prepared to transport Amanda to jail.

“Stand up for me,” one officer instructed.

She stood slowly.

“Turn around. Pull your sleeves up.”

They secured the handcuffs more tightly.

“Just don’t do anything stupid,” the officer said calmly.

Amanda looked at him.

“What am I being charged with?” she asked.

“We’ll go over that on the way,” he replied.

Court records would later reveal the full list of charges.

Amanda Janszen was charged with second-degree murder, attempted murder, five counts of child neglect, and fleeing law enforcement.

She later pleaded no contest to the charges and was adjudicated guilty on all eight counts.

For the murder of Anna Terrell, she was sentenced to life in prison. Additional sentences totaling thirty years were imposed for the remaining charges.

The court also ordered that she have no contact with her children unless recommended by a therapist.

As officers finished paperwork late that night, one of them looked over at Amanda standing quietly by the wall.

“You don’t have to put your face against it,” he told her. “You’re not in timeout.”

She leaned back slightly, exhausted after the long day.

Another officer asked a final routine question.

“Are you pregnant or think you might be pregnant?”

Amanda shook her head slowly.

“I don’t know,” she said.

Outside the station, the Christmas night in Gainesville had returned to silence, but the violence that had erupted in that Walgreens parking lot would ripple through the lives of everyone involved for years to come.