Mother of Louisville shooter frantically called 911 to warn of his plans

(Reuters) - The mother of the 25-year-old bank employee who killed five people and wounded nine others in a shooting rampage at his Kentucky workplace on Monday had frantically called 911 to report her son’s intention, emergency calls released on Wednesday showed.

The calls, one of which came from an employee who witnessed the attack while on a video conference meeting, were shared by the Louisville Metropolitan Police Department hours before hundreds of residents gathered to mourn at a vigil at the city’s Muhammad Ali Center.

Police identified the shooter in Louisville as Connor Sturgeon, who was employed at the Old National Bank’s downtown branch at the time of the shooting. He was killed by police on Monday.

Monday morning, amid a flurry of calls coming in from panicked bank employees as the shooting unfolded, a woman who identified herself as the suspect’s mother called in to the city’s emergency line.

Between shaky breaths, she told the operator she had heard from her son’s roommate that he had left a note indicating he had a gun and was heading toward the bank.

“He’s never hurt anyone, he’s a really good kid,” the woman, whose name was omitted from the recording, said. “We don’t even own guns, I don’t know where he would have gotten a gun.”

Monday’s shooting brought the number of people killed by gun violence in Louisville to 40 in 2023 so far, Louisville Mayor Craig Greenberg said in his remarks at the vigil.

“We are all in pain right now,”

Greenberg said at the vigil. “Whether you knew some of these wonderful people who were killed on Monday or not we come together this evening to acknowledge that every violent death is tragic.”

There have been 146 mass shootings in the United States so far in 2023, the most at this point in the year since 2016, according to the Gun Violence Archive. The nonprofit group defines a mass shooting as four or more shot or killed, not including the shooter.

Barely two weeks before the Louisville massacre, a former student at a private Christian school in Nashville shot and killed three 9-year-old students and three staff members. While mass shootings have become commonplace in the U.S., the shooting stunned the Tennessee city and the country.