Killer took gun to meeting
Police say Illinois warehouse shooter was about to lose his job.
AURORA, Ill. — The man who gunned down five co-workers and wounded a sixth at a suburban Chicago manufacturing warehouse before shooting and wounding five police officers took his gun to a meeting in which he was going to be fired, authorities said Saturday.
Right after learning Friday that he was being fired from his job of 15 years at the Henry Pratt Co. warehouse in Aurora, Gary Martin pulled out a gun and began shooting, killing the three people in the room with him and two others just outside and wounding a sixth employee, police said Saturday.
Scott Hall, president and CEO of Mueller Water Products Inc., which owns Henry Pratt, said Martin arrived at work for his normal shift Friday and was being fired when he started shooting.
“We can confirm that the individual was being terminated Friday for a culmination of a various workplace rules violations,” he said at a news conference Saturday. He gave no details of the violations by Martin at the plant that makes valves for industrial purposes.
A company background check of Martin when he joined Henry Pratt 15 years ago did not turn up a 1995 felony conviction for aggravated assault in Mississippi, Hall said.
Martin fired on officers when they arrived at the scene Friday, striking one outside and another near the building’s entrance. The other three wounded officers were shot inside the building. None of the wounds was life-threatening, Police Chief Kristen Ziman said at a news conference.
All of the officers who were wounded were shot within the first five minutes of arriving at the scene, authorities said. After that flurry of shots and with officers from throughout the region streaming in to help, Martin ran off and hid in the back of the building, where officers found him about an hour later and killed him during an exchange of gunfire, police said.
“He was probably waiting for us to get to him there,” Aurora police Lt. Rick Robertson said. “It was just a very short gunfight and it was over, so he was basically in the back waiting for us and fired upon us and our officers fired.”
Police identified the slain workers as human-resources manager Clayton Parks of Elgin; plant manager Josh Pinkard of Oswego; mold operator Russell Beyer of Yorkville; stockroom attendant and forklift operator Vicente Juarez of Oswego; and human-resources intern and Northern Illinois University student Trevor Wehner, who lived in DeKalb and grew up in Sheridan.
A native of Alabama, Pinkard became plant manager at Henry Pratt in the spring of 2018. He was in the meeting with the gunman.
The company said Pinkard, 37, joined the parent company 13 years ago at its Albertville, Ala., facility.
The father of three earned a bachelor’s degree in industrial engineering from Mississippi State University and a master’s degree from the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, according to his LinkedIn account.
It was Wehner’s first day on the job, his uncle Jay Wehner said. Trevor Wehner, 21, was on the dean’s list at Northern Illinois University’s business college and was on track to graduate in May with a degree in human resource management.
“He always, always was happy. I have no bad words for him. He was a wonderful person. You can’t say anything but nice things about him,” Jay Wehner said of his nephew.
The worker who was shot but survived was taken to a hospital with injuries that were not life-threatening, authorities said. A sixth police officer suffered a knee injury during the search of the building.
Martin had been arrested six times in Aurora over the years, including for domestic battery, Ziman said.
He was able to buy the Smith and Wesson .40-caliber handgun he used in the attack because an initial background check didn’t catch that he had a felony conviction in Mississippi, the chief said. Martin was issued a firearm owner’s identification card in January 2014 after he passed the initial background check and he bought the gun that March 11.
It wasn’t until he applied for a concealed-carry permit five days later and went through a more rigorous background check that uses digital fingerprinting that his 1995 felony conviction was flagged and his firearm owner’s ID card was revoked, Ziman said. Once his card was revoked, he could no longer legally have a gun.
The shooting shocked the city of 200,000, which is about 40 miles west of Chicago.
“For so many years, we have seen similar situations throughout our nation and the horrible feeling that we get when we see it on the news. To experience it firsthand, is even more painful,” Aurora Mayor Richard Irvin said Friday.