Texas officials are hailing the police officer who ended Saturday’s horrific shooting at a mall as a hero for saving “countless lives.”

The officer is still processing the events from Saturday and is not ready to have his bio made public, according to Allen police.

“If he hadn’t have been there, I think we’d have had a much more severe situation,” Hank Sibley, the regional director of the Texas Department of Public Safety, said Tuesday.

Authorities added that it took four minutes for them to neutralize the threat.

The shooter, who killed eight people at the Allen, Tex., mall, has been identified as 33-year-old Mauricio Garcia. Officials say he had neo-Nazi leanings and brought eight guns that he had purchased legally to the rampage.

The investigation into Garcia’s motives is ongoing. He had no criminal history prior to the attack and was released from the Army due to mental health issues, with neighbors saying he generally acted friendly during brief interactions.

Sibley said Garcia apparently “targeted the location, rather than a specific group of people,” and that “he was very random in the people he killed.”

Officials say that he had a patch on his chest when his body was found. It read “RWDS,” an acronym for “Right Wing Death Squad,” a moniker popular among right-wing extremists and white supremacy organizations.

Garcia’s posts on a Russian social networking site led police to conclude he’d planned for weeks before launching the attack in Allen, a diverse town of roughly 100,000 people about 25 miles north of Dallas.

Among the eight victims was a 20-year-old security guard who is also being hailed for his bravery.

Christian LaCour “evacuated one individual to safety and was shot while courageously remaining to help others,” Allen Police Chief Brian Harvey said Tuesday.

With News Wire Services