Several victims of the bank shooting remain hospitalized as Louisville police investigate what happened
The Man Who Shot Two People at a Bank on a Live Video Stream: A Staff Meeting and a Gunfire Exchange at the Bank
Bank employees, a beloved parishioner and a huge fan of the community are among five people who were killed in a shooting at a bank in downtown Louisville.
The man who shot and killed two people at Old National Bank was using a live video stream on his computer, officials said. He opened fire inside a conference room during a morning staff meeting, Rebecca Buchheit-Sims, a manager at the bank, told CNN.
She said the massacre “happened very quickly.” The staff meeting was virtual and she witnessed gunfire exploding on her computer screen.
One of the hospitalized victims, 57-year-old Deana Eckert, died later Monday, police announced, though it is unclear if she was among the three people in critical condition earlier in the day.
The four other victims, who died Monday morning, were identified by police as Joshua Barrick, 40; Juliana Farmer, 45; Tommy Elliott, 63; and James Tutt, 64.
According to a law enforcement source, the bank notified the worker that he would be fired, as he had been employed there full-time for close to two years.
The source said the gunman left behind a note for his parents and a friend indicating he planned to carrying out a shooting at his workplace, though it is unclear when the message was found.
After police arrive, a gunfire exchange ensues before they shoot and kill the man.
The Gun Violence Archive notes a shooting victim killed in Louisville, Ky., during the heaviest moments of the unfolding tragedy
The Gun Violence Archive says Monday’s atrocity in Louisville was one of at least 146 mass shootings in the US this year, but does not include the shooter.
Although Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear has ordered flags to be flown at half-staff until Friday night in honor of the victims, some democrats worry that the responses to the tragedy will not contain meaningful gun violence solutions.
“My worry is that everybody will raise their fists in anger and mourn and then in six weeks, eight weeks we go back to doing the same – nothing,” state Sen. David Yates told CNN Monday. I want them to not have to die in vain like some of the other victims. Maybe there is something positive that can come from it.
Too many Americans are paying for the cost of not doing something. When will Republicans in Congress act to protect our communities?,” the president said in a tweet.
Members of the Old National Bank executive team, including CEO Jim Ryan, were in Louisville Monday on the heels of the shooting, the company said on Facebook.
“As we await more details, we are deploying employee assistance support and keeping everyone affected by this tragedy in our thoughts and prayers,” Ryan said in a statement that morning.
One bank employee frantically called her husband as she sheltered inside a locked vault, the husband, Caleb Goodlett told CNN affiiliate WLKY. The police were aware of the shooting when he called them, he said.
The incredible video shows rookies Officer Nickolas Wilt and his training officer, C.J. Galloway, arriving at the scene. After they take fire coming from inside the bank, Wilt slams the car into reverse before getting out with his handgun. Galloway races to the trunk to retrieve his service rifle. They both move up a set of steps even if they didn’t know where the shooter was. After a loud noise, and a gunshot, Galloway fell down on the ground. Wilt, who is blurred in the footage, lies shot in the head – another victim of the weapons of war that are often the preferred choice of mass killers. He is a good guy who was outgunned by the bad guy who also had a powerful weapon.
A federal law enforcement source tells CNN that the gun used was an assault-style rifle. The semi-automatic rifle is the most popular sporting rifle in the US, and 30% of gun owners reported having owned an AR-15 or similar-style rifle, according to the 2021 National Firearms Survey. The Covenant school shooting in Nashville two weeks ago is one of the most terrible mass shootings in recent memory, with the weapon of choice being the AR-15.
Tommy Elliot, the Founding Father of the Bank: “In the Beginning, I Wouldn’t Wanna Shoot,” a Louisville Man Remembered
A senator who represents the district where the shooting happened told CNN that the bank sits on the fringes of Louisville’s developing downtown business district. He said that you wouldn’t expect anything to happen at this location.
“This is not a state that is friendly to those who would think about gun reform or gun control in some way or even reasonable.” This isn’t that state. However, the effort continues.”
One of the shooting victims, bank senior vice president Tommy Elliot, was remembered by several local and state leaders as a close mentor and beloved community leader.
“Tommy was a great man. He cared about finding good people and putting them in positions to do great things. He embraced me when I was very young and interested in politics,” state Sen. David Yates told CNN. “He was about lifting people up, building them up.”
Kentucky Gov. Beshear and Greenberg were also friends of Elliott, according to the man who was with him at the hospital.
“It is painful, painful for all of the families I know,” Greenberg said while speaking with CNN’s Jake Tapper. It hits home because you know a victim so well.
Beshear called the others who were killed ” amazing people” who will be missed and mourned by their communities.
The Louisville Firefighter who was killed by a gunman open fire is not the day you plant the seed, but you can always eat the fruit
A Louisville police officer who was sworn in less than two weeks ago is in critical condition after stopping a gunman who opened fire at a downtown bank on Monday.
Monday after Easter is a busy day in Louisville, with morning commuters walking down the street. Interim Police Chief Gwinn-Villaroel said that the field training officer and the police officer responded to the scene within three minutes.
A hospital spokesman said that three people remained hospitalized, including one who underwent a brain surgery and was in critical condition.
Prior to joining the police force, Wilt worked as an emergency medical technician, an emergency dispatcher and as a local firefighter. The Baptist Health hospital said he was still employed on an “as-needed basis.”
He wrote in the spot where a career biography would normally go on his website, “The day you plant the seed is not the day you eat the fruit.”
The five patients that are still being treated at the University of Louisville Hospital are not out of danger. One patient was upgraded from critical to fair condition, a hospital spokesperson told CNN. One is still in critical condition, and four are stable and fair.
The Barrick family of Los Angeles mourns the loss of a life-saving software engineer who wrestled a gunman in a dance hall
Gwinn-Villaroel said there could’ve been more victims, had Wilt and the officer not “taken it upon themselves to not wait to assess everything but just went in to assess the threat so that more lives would not be lost.”
In California, a 26-year-old software engineer, Brandon Tsay, wrestled a shooter to the ground at a dance hall in Monterey Park without knowing the gunman had just killed 11 people nearby.
Like the other patients who sustained gunshot wounds, he has a long road of recovery ahead, said Dr. Jason Smith, University of Louisville Health Chief Medical Officer.
“Our hearts are heavy, they are broken, and we are searching for answers,” they wrote. The entire Barrick family is in your prayers, including his wife, Jessica, and their two children who are students in our school.
Juliana Farmer, 45, was also an employee of the bank who had just started a new chapter in her life by moving to Louisville from Henderson, her aunt Vicki Brooks-Scott told CNN affiliate WFIE.
“Jim was very helpful to me as I started my role with Louisville Downtown Partnership last year and had an ‘open-door policy’ with taking any call or question,” Fleischaker said. Jim will be missed.
The rifle used in the downtown Louisville shooting on Monday that killed five people and injured eight was purchased legally by the shooter.
Six days before the attack on the Louisville Metro Police Department, an armed man purchased a weapon from a Louisville dealer.
Emergency services received the first call about three minutes after the shooting, police arrived about three minutes later, and Sturgeon was killed by police three minutes later.
The Louisville Shooting: Why We Shouldn’t Have to Deal With Another City Thermophobicly,” Rep. Morgan McGarvey
At the Tuesday news conference, several officials made emotional pleas to state and federal legislators to do more to combat the kind of deadly gun violence that unfolded in Louisville on Monday.
“I am a person of faith. I was raised in the church. Our children were raised in the church. “If you are a person of faith, please let us know what you think and how we can help you,” said Representative Morgan McGarvey.
“But we need policies in place that will keep this from happening again, so that thoughts and prayers do not have to be offered to yet another community ripped apart by the savage violence coming from guns,” he added.
“Our city is heartbroken,” Louisville Mayor Craig Greenberg told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer on Tuesday evening. “These five victims should not be dead – just like everyone else who was killed by gun violence in our city, in our country, should not be dead.”
“To be honest with you, we barely had to adjust our operating room schedule to be able to do this,” he said. “That’s how frequent we are having to deal with gun violence in our community.”
Smith said he was “weary” after seeing gun violence at the hospital for all of his 15 years there and that it can put a strain on the medical workers who have to tell families their loved ones have died.
“It just breaks your heart. When you hear someone screaming ‘mommy’ or ‘daddy,’ it just becomes too hard day in and day out to be able to do that,” he said.
Why are we here? What we can do about the shooting of a police officer to stop a gun, but what we don’t know about other officers
I’m not sure what the answers are. But to everyone who helps make policy — at state, city, federal — I would simply ask you to do something. It is not working because we’ve been doing nothing.
Some people may wonder if the need for Americans to see this is necessary. But it offers context to the bitter and often futile public debate about to how to stop mass shootings and helps the public understand the horror they involve.
This scene is frightening and contains courage and heroism. It gives a reality check about what happens in moments of terror and leaves the normal political rituals of prayers and gun reform looking empty by comparison.
Body camera footage from Galloway shows him shooting at a man in front of a bank, as officers talk about how they can’t see the man, and then he takes a safe position behind a planter. At some time, at least one person was shot.
Humphrey said he could understand the stress that the officers were going through when he watched the body cam footage. The response was not perfect but it was what we needed.
“It’s just a tragic and brutal aspect of law enforcement in America. Officer Wilt tries to do his job and he is struck down in the course of trying to protect others,” former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe told CNN’s Anderson Cooper on Tuesday.
There is increasing frustration among some police leaders about the risks their officers face while national and state leaders resist changes to gun laws.
The chief of police in Phoenix told the Senate Judiciary Committee that they were out-staffed and out-gunned.
And Los Angeles County Sheriff Robert Luna told CNN why his officers have to continue to train for active shooter situations. “We don’t want it to happen. Statistics tell us it will happen,” he said. “And this is where we do challenge our leaders at a national level, to do more about guns, to do more about mental health so that we don’t have to do this over and over.”
The split screen is a reminder that while partisan politics often paints a simple impression of the state of policing in America, heroism and cruelty co-exist and reality is nuanced.
The police chief of Philadelphia and Washington, DC told CNN that they needed to show the public what happened from camera footage as soon as possible. He said that things have changed in policing.
But the footage formed a heroic counterpoint to the depraved behavior of the shooter in Louisville, who live streamed on social media his rampage inside the bank.
Louisville is set to host a vigil Wednesday to let community members grieve the five people killed this week in a downtown bank shooting, as the public absorbs fresh details that investigators are releasing about how the massacre unfolded.
The vigil comes a day after police released dramatic police body camera footage of Monday’s shooting at Old National Bank, in which authorities say a 25-year-old employee opened fire on his colleagues and then engaged in a shootout with police before he was shot dead.
The attacker, livestreaming the gruesome assault online, killed five of his coworkers around 8:30 a.m. in Kentucky’s most populous city, about 30 minutes before the facility was to open, authorities said. A police officer is in critical condition after he was shot in the head.
It’s not known what caused the shooter to go on the deadly rampage. As an investigation continues, officials expect to release audio Wednesday of 911 calls about the shooting, the mayor said.
The vigil will “acknowledge the wounds, physical and emotional, that gun violence leaves behind,” Greenberg told reporters Tuesday. “It will be an interfaith opportunity for our entire community to come together – to grieve, to heal, to begin to move forward.”
The Louisville Shooting of a High-Velocity Worker by a Black Hole Assailant: A Total Shock
The Louisville police lieutenant colonel said that the situation lasted nine minutes from when the man began firing his weapon to when he was killed by police.
The gunman then tries to shoot her in the back but fails because the safety is on and the weapon still needs to be loaded, the official said. Once the shooter loads the weapon properly and takes the safety off, he shoots the worker in the back, the official said.
The assailant then continues his rampage, firing at workers while they tried to outrun him, the official said. The shooter doesn’t go to other floors in the bank.
“This is a total shock. He was a really good kid who came from a really good family,” said the classmate, who asked not to be identified and has not spoken with Sturgeon in recent years. I can’t say how much of it doesn’t make sense. I can’t believe it.”