Four Sikhs among victims of mass shooting at Fedex
As the tight-knit community reels, a call to action
Amarjit Sekhon, a 48year-old mother of two sons, was the breadwinner of her family and one of many members of Indianapolis’ tight knit Sikh community employed at the Fedex warehouse.
Her death Thursday in a mass shooting that claimed the lives of seven other Fedex employees — four of them Sikhs — has left that community stunned and in mourning, her brother-in-law, Kuldip Sekhon, said Saturday.
He said his sister-inlaw began working at the Fedex facility in November and was a dedicated worker whose husband was disabled.
“She was a workaholic, she always was working, working,” he said. “She would never sit still … the other day she had the (COVID-19) shot and she was really sick, but she still went to work.”
In addition, the Marion County Coroner’s office identified the dead Friday as: Matthew R. Alexander, 32; Samaria Blackwell, 19; Amarjeet Johal, 66; Jasvinder Kaur, 50; Jaswinder Singh, 68; Karli Smith, 19; and John Weisert, 74.
Police said Brandon Scott Hole, 19, began firing randomly at people in the parking lot of the Fedex facility, killing four, before entering the building, fatally shooting four more people and then turning
the gun on himself.
Deputy Police Chief Craig Mccartt said Hole was a former employee of Fedex and last worked for the company in 2020.
About 90 percent of the workers at the Fedex warehouse are members of the local Sikh community, Indianapolis Police Chief Randal Taylor said.
There are between 8,000 and 10,000 Sikh Americans in Indiana, according to the Sikh Coalition.
The shooting comes the week Sikhs are celebrating Vaisakhi, a major holiday festival that marks the date Sikhism was born as a collective faith.
Tejpaul Singh Bainiwal of Stockton, Calif., who participated in a martial arts tournament in Indiana, said this year’s holiday celebrations would be intensely somber.
“How do you celebrate after something like this?” he said.
Satjeet Kaur, the Sikh Coalition’s executive director, said the entire
community was traumatized by the “senseless” violence. “While we don’t yet know the motive of the shooter, he targeted a facility known to be heavily populated by Sikh employees,” Kaur said.
The shooting is the deadliest incident of violence collectively in the Sikh community in the U.S. since 2012, when a white supremacist burst into a Sikh temple in Wisconsin and shot 10 people. Seven died. That gunman killed himself during a firefight with police.
Several dozen people gathered at the Olivet Missionary Baptist
Church on the city’s west side Saturday afternoon to mourn and to call for action.
“The system failed our state the other night,” said Cathy Weinmann, a volunteer with Moms Demand Action. “That young man should have never had access to a gun. We will not accept this, and we demand better than this for our community.”