Sikh group calls for probe of FedEx rampage

INDIANAPOLIS — Half of the eight workers shot to death at an FedEx facility by a former employee belonged to the Sikh religious community, leading an advocacy group to urge a probe of possible racial or ethnic hatred as a factor.

Law enforcement officials said Saturday they have yet to determine what motivated the gunman, 19-year-old Brandon Hole, who was white, to carry out Thursday night's rampage, at a FedEx operations centre near Indianapolis International Airport.

It came a little over a year after Hole was briefly placed under psychiatric detention by police when his mother reported her concerns that he was contemplating “suicide by cop,” according to the FBI. A shotgun was seized from his home.

FBI agents who interviewed the teenager last April found no criminal violation at the time and determined he possessed no “racially motivated violent extremism ideology,” said Paul Keenan, special agent in charge of the FBI's Indianapolis field office.

But the New York-based Sikh Coalition, a civil rights advocacy group, called for a full investigation into “the possibility of bias as factor” in the FedEx killings.

The Sikh Coalition's executive director, Satjeet Kaur, said more than 8,000 Sikh-Americans live in Indiana.

The recent surge in U.S. mass gun violence began on March 16 when a gunman shot eight people to death, including six Asian woman, at three Atlanta-area day spas before he was arrested.

That rampage heightened tensions already brewing over a rise in hate crimes and discrimination directed at Asian Americans in recent years, stoked in part by racially inflammatory rhetoric about the coronavirus pandemic's origins in China.

The shooting lasted only a couple of minutes and was over by the time police responded to the scene.

Officers found the suspect dead of an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound.