Details emerge in Tenn. grocery store shooting
COLLIERVILLE, Tenn. — Two women who had been strangers prior to Thursday’s mass shooting at a Tennessee supermarket clenched each other’s hands and fought back tears Friday, as they gathered at a vigil to pray for healing from the previous day’s rampage at a Kroger where the shooter worked.
Hollie Skaggs and Sara Wiles happened to be running errands at the same Kroger in Collierville. A day later, after a gunman killed one person and himself and wounded 14 others, Skaggs called Wiles her guardian angel.
“It’s been a very trying last few hours,” Skaggs said. “Sara and I didn’t know each other before. But now, I told her from the beginning when we came out, she’s my guardian angel. I’m just grateful for her. We ran and hid and heard everything. It was very, very traumatic.”
The gunman, identified by police as UK Thang, worked in a sushi business at the store and was the son of refugees from Myanmar who had settled in Nashville, a family friend said.
Police have described Thang as a “third-party vendor” who worked at the Kroger in Collierville on a daily basis. He died of an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound within a couple of minutes of officers arriving at the Kroger in the suburb outside of Memphis.
The victims included 10 employees and five customers, police said. On Friday, some of the wounded were still in critical condition and fighting for their lives, Police Chief Dale Lane said at a morning news conference.
Lane identified the woman who was killed as Olivia King. Friends told the Commercial Appeal she was a widowed mother of three.
On Facebook, one of her King’s sons, Wes King, wrote that he had spoken to the trauma surgeon and learned his mother was shot in the chest.
“They tried to save her at the hospital to no avail,” he wrote. “I apologize for the graphic details, but this type of crime needs to stop being glossed over and sanitized. No one deserves this.”
Police searched the shooter’s home Thursday and removed electronic devices.
“We all want to know the why,” Lane said of the shooter’s motive. “But today, less than 24 hours (after the shooting), we’re not ready to tell you that.”
The shooter, acting alone, did not appear to target anyone specifically as he rampaged through the building on a sunny Thursday afternoon, police said.