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FARMINGTON - Taking a break at work, Mackenzie Glade Hunter showed co-worker Sulejman Talovic a cellular phone video of himself firing an AK-47 in the Wyoming desert.
Hunter now thinks that small decision changed his life, leading to a gun sale that forever connects him to one of the worst massacres in Utah history.
Talovic began repeatedly asking for help getting a gun, Hunter said, and he eventually sold the 17-year-old a handgun. Months later, Talovic used it to fatally shoot Vanessa Quinn, one of five shoppers he killed in a Feb. 12 rampage at Trolley Square.
"He wouldn't give it up," Hunter said. "He wouldn't. Looking back, I guess I should have taken that as a sign of something."
Hunter, 20, spoke Thursday during an interview at the Davis County jail, where he is awaiting transfer to a federal prison. Last week, a judge sentenced him to 15 months for two charges related to his sale of the .38-caliber Smith & Wesson, illegal because Talovic was a minor.
He has written to Quinn's parents - a letter they cannot yet bear to open. He wants to learn a trade and eventually own his own business, but is contrite and ready to first serve his prison sentence.
"It was a really horrible thing to be involved with," Hunter said. "I deserved what I got - definitely."
'More guns than you can imagine': Hunter and Talovic met at work in the summer of 2006, just as Hunter felt he was getting his life back on track.
After graduating from high school and getting a job, Hunter said, he wrecked a couple of cars and started using drugs, including marijuana and cocaine. For nine months, he was distant from his family.
In October 2005, he was arrested in Sandy for a car burglary and later pleaded guilty. In June 2006, Salt Lake City police stopped a car in which he was a passenger, and determined that a bag of psychedelic mushrooms and a marijuana pipe belonged to him, according to police.
But prosecutors declined to file charges, and Hunter said his misbehavior stopped.
"Selling guns and doing drugs, that's not me," Hunter said. "I've always been in sports. I'm not a drug addict."
With Talovic and Talovic's quiet father, Suljo, Hunter broke down walls, tore out pipes and did other demolition for remodeling at the Stratford Hotel in Salt Lake City.
Talovic never mentioned having friends, but was outgoing, he said. Hunter sometimes called him "sue-lee," a shortened version of Sulejman.
Talovic shared memories of his family's time in war-torn Bosnia, where they had lived before coming to America in 1998. He described seeing people shot to death and stockpiles of guns around the country. Once, Talovic said, "I used to have more guns than you can imagine," Hunter said.
One day, Hunter said, Talovic said he wanted to rob a bank. Hunter said he cannot recall how or why Talovic said it, but he remembers it as a joke and said they never spoke of it again.
Cutting the deal: Seeing the AK-47 video, Hunter thinks, gave Talovic the idea to ask him for a gun. Hunter claims he never wondered why Talovic wanted one, but knew he was too young to legally buy one and repeatedly rebuffed him.
Eventually, Talovic offered $800. Hunter, who was making $9 an hour at the hotel job, felt like the offer was a lot of money and agreed.
Prosecutors said Hunter had obtained the .38 Special from a man in Wyoming in June 2006 and brought it back to Utah, where he gave it to Brenden Taylor Brown, 21.
On a night between mid-June and late July 2006, according to federal documents, Talovic, Hunter and Brown met in a McDonald's parking lot near the Utah State Fairgrounds.
Hunter said he and Brown went through the drive-through window when Talovic was late. Eventually Talovic hopped in the back seat. Hunter put the gun in his McDonald's bag and passed it back; Talovic handed him $800 in cash. Hunter counted it and Talovic left.
"We really didn't talk too much," Hunter said. "[Talovic] was being really fast about it."
Hunter said he didn't think selling the gun was "something so horrible that I shouldn't do it."
That was the only time Talovic and Hunter saw each other outside work. After Hunter left the demolition job, he never saw Talovic again.
'Is this real?' Weeks after the shootings at Trolley Square, agents with the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco Firearms and Explosives visited Hunter - who had not realized his former co-worker was the killer.
He said he was stunned - and felt "an amazing amount of guilt" - when the agents told him Talovic had used the gun that formerly belonged to Hunter to kill Quinn.
"It was like, 'Is this real?' " Hunter remembers.
Talovic used a 12-gauge shotgun to kill four other shoppers and injure four more before police shot and killed him. Quinn had gone to the mall to meet her husband and belatedly buy wedding rings.
After his indictment for the gun sale, Hunter was free on bail - until he was ordered into jail for testing positive for marijuana and skipping screenings and counseling sessions.
He eventually pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge of transferring a handgun to a juvenile and a felony count of being a drug user in possession of a gun.
Quinn's parents wanted a longer prison term of 99 months. They are pursuing appeals after a judge ruled they could not speak at the sentencing because they were not victims of the gun sale.
Hunter said his letter to Quinn's family describes how sorry he feels for them. But he places the blame for her death with Talovic.
"It's not my fault [Talovic] did what he did," Hunter said. "If I would have known, I wouldn't have let him do what he did. I would have called the police."
Ken Antrobus, Quinn's father, said he and his wife are not ready to read Hunter's letter. But Antrobus said he has no ill will toward Hunter, and only wants an appropriate punishment.
"I know he's a young guy," Antrobus said. "I hope he gets some education in prison and I hope he comes out and wants to live a clean life and does good things."
Hunter said he wants that, too. As for Talovic, Hunter said he has no sympathy toward him.
"The first words that come to my mind is 'hate,' " Hunter said. "What he did was so horrible."
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* PAMELA MANSON contributed to this story.