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As a subscriber you can listen to articles at work, in the car, or while you work out. Subscribe NowAuthorities say police seized a gun last year from the suspected shooter who opened fire with a rifle at a FedEx facility in Indianapolis, killing eight.
At a news conference Friday afternoon, Deputy Police Chief Craig McCartt also confirmed the gunman’s identity as 19-year-old Brandon Scott Hole. McCartt said Hole was a former employee of the company and last worked for FedEx in fall 2020. McCartt said he did not know why Hole left the job or if he had ties to the workers in the facility.
He said police have not yet uncovered a motive for Thursday’s shooting.
McCartt said authorities are still identifying the victims and that not all of the victims’ families have been notified.
The investigators searched a home in Indianapolis associated with Hole and seized evidence, including desktop computers and other electronic media, the officials said.
Police said Hole had gun seized from him by authorities last year.
Indianapolis police said earlier that they had not yet discovered the gunman’s motive for opening fire with a rifle late Thursday night at a FedEx processing center near the Indianapolis airport. About 100 people were at the facility at the time of the shooting, police said.
Indianapolis Deputy Police Chief Craig McCartt said the gunman started randomly shooting at people in the parking lot and then went into the building and continued firing. He said the shooter apparently died by suicide shortly before police entered the building.
“There was no confrontation with anyone that was there,” he said. “There was no disturbance, there was no argument. He just appeared to randomly start shooting.”
McCartt said four people were killed outside the building and another four inside. Several people were also wounded, including five who were taken to the hospital.
The carnage took just a couple of minutes. “It did not last very long,” he said.
Officials with the coroner’s office began the process of identifying victims Friday afternoon, a process they said would take several hours.
Police Chief Randal Taylor noted that a “significant” number of employees at the facility are members of the Sikh community, and the Sikh Coalition later confirmed that members of the community were among the wounded and killed.
The coalition, which identifies itself as the largest Sikh civil rights organization in the U.S., said in a statement that it expected authorities to “conduct a full investigation—including the possibility of bias as a factor.” The coalition’s executive director, Satjeet Kaur, noted in the statement that more than 8,000 Sikh Americans live in Indiana.
The families’ agonizing waiting was exacerbated by the fact that most employees aren’t allowed to carry cellphones inside the FedEx building, making contact with them difficult.
“When you see notifications on your phone, but you’re not getting a text back from your kid and you’re not getting information and you still don’t know where they are … what are you supposed to do?” Mindy Carson said early Friday, fighting back tears.
Later Friday morning, Carson said she had heard from her daughter Jessica, who works in the facility and that she was OK. She was going to meet her, but didn’t say where.
FedEx said in a statement that cellphone access is limited to a small number of workers in the dock and package sorting areas to “support safety protocols and minimize potential distractions.”
FedEx Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Frederick Smith called the shooting a “senseless act of violence.”
“This is a devastating day, and words are hard to describe the emotions we all feel,” he wrote in an email to employees.
The killings marked the latest in a string of recent mass shootings across the country and the third mass shooting this year in Indianapolis. Five people, including a pregnant woman, were shot and killed in the city in January, and a man was accused of killing three adults and a child before abducting his daughter during at argument at a home in March. In other states last month, eight people were fatally shot at massage businesses in the Atlanta area, and 10 died in gunfire at a supermarket in Boulder, Colorado.
Indianapolis Mayor Joe Hogsett said the community must guard against resignation and “the assumption that this is simply how it must be and we might as well get used to it.”
President Joe Biden said he had been briefed on the shooting and called gun violence “an epidemic” in the U.S.
“Too many Americans are dying every single day from gun violence. It stains our character and pierces the very soul of our nation,” he said in a statement.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said she was “horrified and heartbroken” by the shooting and called for congressional action on gun control.
“As we pray for the families of all affected, we must work urgently to enact commonsense gun violence prevention laws to save lives & prevent this suffering,” the Democratic leader said in a tweet.
A witness said he was working inside the building when he heard several gunshots in rapid succession.
“I see a man come out with a rifle in his hand and he starts firing and he starts yelling stuff that I could not understand,” Levi Miller told WTHR-TV. “What I ended up doing was ducking down to make sure he did not see me because I thought he would see me and he would shoot me.”
A man told WTTV that his niece was sitting in the driver’s seat of her car when the gunfire erupted, and she was wounded.
“She got shot on her left arm,” said Parminder Singh. “She’s fine, she’s in the hospital now.”
Gov. Eric Holcomb ordered flags to be flown at half-staff until April 20, and he and others decried the shooting.
Chris Bavender, a spokesperson for the FBI’s Indianapolis office, said the bureau is helping with the investigation.
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Somebody needs to tell Nancy Pelosi that no matter what she and her government moles do, that individual is going to have a gun to commit whatever senseless act he feels he needs to do. It wasn’t the gun that killed those people, it was the individual that pulled the trigger.
But how did this killer get the weapon? There is much we do not know.
Let’s have some Dem knee-jerk gun control bills. Political Placebo. What are the real issues? Societal breakdown, lack of mental health facilities, lack of family support…..
Anthony – it was the person and the gun that caused the senseless murders.
if the gun wasn’t there no one can pull the trigger- repeal the second amendment
Sam – leave the country if you don’t like the second amendment
Don’t even try.
Correct. Other countries have mentally unstable citizens. We’re just the only one that gurantees the right to have a deadly weapon. Might be why we have more mass shootings than anywhere else.
Do you think 38 of 50 states would ratify a repeal?
Chris
I support the 2nd amendment but what right do you have to tell somebody to leave?
Are his 1st amendment rights not just as valid?
Not only that but amendments have been repealed before.
Have you never heard of the 18th amendment?
Agree.
Chris, if one of the eight victims was a brother or father or sister of yours, I don’t think you would be as flippant about the ease in which a person can acquire a semi automatic rapid firing weapon. You don’t hunt deer with machine guns or assault rifles, so they shouldn’t be available to civilians. And mental health is a key element in most of these mass shoutings. If you suspect someone has these types of weapons, say something or do something
Machine guns and auto weapons are strongly controlled. That is not the cause of.the problem.
More guns equals more gun deaths. It’s not complicated. When the second amendment was written, people had muskets – totally in favor of letting everyone have a musket. That would be originalism, wouldn’t it?…
An originalist interpretation would grant us access to M4 and M16 rifles. The intent of 2A is for the people, and states, to have a fighting chance against a tyrannical federal government.