ALGONA, Iowa — The families of two clerks killed during robberies at convenience stores in northern Iowa are grasping for answers about why they died.

Vicky Bowman-Hall, a mother of 11, was shot at a gas station in Algona Monday night and died at a hospital. Sheila Myers was shot and killed about an hour later at a store in Humboldt.

Seventeen-year-old Michael Richard Swanson, of St. Louis Park, Minn., is charged in their deaths.

Bowman-Hall’s daughter, Jillian Bowman, told The Des Moines Register that she remembers holding her mother’s hand in the hospital and telling her that she would “take care of everybody.”

Myers’ daughter, Mandy, told the newspaper that news video of her mother’s alleged killer smiling after his arrest left her disturbed and asking “a lot of whys.”

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