Nation grapples with another gun rampage
He appeared in the parking lot after dark — a hooded figure with a gun who immediately began spraying bullets in every direction.
He stepped into the FedEx warehouse, a place where he had once worked, and continued shooting, “firing into the open,” according to one witness.
He shouted unintelligibly as he fired off round after round, and then, before the police could even arrive, he had killed himself, leaving in his wake eight dead and at least seven wounded.
On Thursday night, in a terrifyingly quick spasm of violence, Indianapolis faced its third mass shooting since the start of the year. And a nation already weary from a pandemic grappled with yet another bloody rampage, only weeks after back-to-back mass shootings last month at spas in the Atlanta area and at a grocery store in Boulder, Colo.
“It is a national embarrassment, what’s going on,” President Biden said in a news conference on Friday, as he repeated his support for a ban on assault weapons. “And it’s not only these mass shootings that are occurring. Every single day, every single day, there’s a mass shooting in the United States if you count all those who are killed out on the streets of our cities and our rural areas. It’s a national embarrassment and must come to an end.”
The mayor of Indianapolis, Joe Hogsett, told reporters of the “scourge of gun violence that has killed far too many” in his city and in the country as a whole. “What we are left with this morning is grief,” he said, “grief for the families of those killed, grief for the employees who have lost their co-workers and grief for the many Americans struggling to understand how tragedies like this continue to occur, again and again.”
The gunman was identified by law enforcement officials on Friday as Brandon Scott Hole, a 19-year-old who used to work at the warehouse, and who was already on law enforcement radar.
The victims were identified by the police as Matthew R. Alexander, 32; Samaria Blackwell, 19; Amarjeet Johal, 66; Jaswinder Kaur, 64; Jaswinder Singh, 68; Amarjit Sekhon, 48; Karli Smith, 19; and John Weisert, 74.
Around 11 p.m., the gunman arrived at the facility, a huge warehouse lined with truck docks sitting a few miles outside of the Indianapolis airport. There were at least 100 people inside around that time, Deputy Chief Craig McCartt said. It was a shift change, a pause in the night when some head home and others walk out into the parking lot to smoke, have a bite to eat or listen to music in their cars.
Armed with a rifle, the gunman “got out of his car and pretty quickly started some random shooting,” McCartt said. “There was no confrontation with anyone that was there, there was no disturbance, there was no argument. He just appeared to randomly start shooting.”
Witnesses described sudden chaos and ducking for cover as a man with a rifle appeared at the entrance shouting and firing.
Kamal Jawandha, whose parents were sorters who had been working at the facility on Thursday night, said his mother hid in the bathroom during the rampage. When the shooting was over, his parents saw one of the victims, a person whom they knew, lying dead on the floor.
“She’s in deep sadness,” Jawandha said of his mother. “She just can’t stop shaking. She can’t believe this kind of thing would happen here.”
Calls began coming into the police from several people at the warehouse who described a barrage of gunfire, the police dispatch turning into an account of growing horror. Officers arrived to find people dead and wounded in the parking lot and inside the building. The gunman was among them.
The chaos within the facility, and in the homes of the employees, was intensified by the fact that many employees did not have cellphones with them.
Jim Masilak, a FedEx spokesman, confirmed Friday that cellphone access is limited within the warehouse, where packages are sorted for shipping, to minimize distractions. Such policies are common in the industry.
But for family members, not hearing from their loved ones was agonizing.