“Our community has come a long way from physical, mental and spiritual healing to recover from this tragedy,” Maninder Singh Walia told CNN in an interview Friday night.
On Friday night, Indianapolis police released the names of the eight deceased victims. They are: 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.
A statement from the Indiana Metropolitan Police Department said the next of kin had been notified by the Marion County Coroner’s Office. Cause of death, according to the statement, will be determined after autopsies are completed.
Walia said four of the eight victims were Sikh.
The Indiana community has grown in recent years, he said. When he moved to the area in 1999, there were about 50 families in the area. Now, more than 10,000 families have come to Indianapolis for economic opportunity and good schools, Walia said.
“It’s a tragedy for all of us and we are all family,” he said. ‘We are neighbours. We will do everything we can to help our city heal in the coming weeks and months. It’s not like it will go away. ‘
The attack marks at least the 45th mass shooting in the US since the shooting near Atlanta on March 16. CNN considers an incident to be a mass shooting when four or more people, not including the shooter, are injured or killed by gunfire.
It is the deadliest shooting since 10 people were killed on March 22 at a supermarket in Boulder, Colorado.
How the night unfolded
The shooting lasted only a few minutes, according to the police.
It started when the shooter “got out of his car and pretty quickly started a random shooting outside the facility,” said Deputy Police Chief Craig McCartt.
The shooter “went in and didn’t get very far into the facility at all,” shooting others there, McCartt said.
She waited for him to enter so she could drive away without drawing the shooter’s attention. She went to another parking lot and called the police. She said she then tried to warn other arriving workers that shooting was taking place. Some stopped and others passed her.
Investigators have heard that the shooting “only lasted a few minutes – that it didn’t last very long,” McCartt said.
“I understand that by the time agents came in … the situation was over – that the suspect took his life shortly before agents entered the facility,” McCartt told reporters.
There were at least 100 people in the facility when the shooting began, he said. Many were eating or changing shifts.
Four people were found dead outside and four others, not including the shooter, were dead inside, McCartt said.
Police who want to understand the motive
McCartt identified the shooter Friday afternoon as 19-year-old Brandon Hole, who was last employed by FedEx in 2020.
In March 2020, Hole’s mother told police he could attempt “suicide by an agent,” the FBI’s Indianapolis office said in a statement.
Special Agent Paul Keenan said Hole was placed on a temporary mental health watch by the Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department. He also said a shotgun had been confiscated from Hole’s residence.
“Based on items seen in the suspect’s bedroom at the time, he was interviewed by the FBI in April 2020,” the statement said. “No racially motivated violent extremism (RMVE) ideology was identified during the review and no criminal offense was identified. The gun was not returned to the suspect.”
McCartt told reporters that Indianapolis police had found Hole’s name in two previous incident reports. The deputy chief had no information about the first report. The details he described from a 2020 report are consistent with the FBI’s statement.
When asked what brought the suspected shooter to the FedEx facility around 11pm Thursday, McCartt said, “I wish we could answer that.”
Amanda Watts, Evan Perez, Shimon Prokupecz, Kay Jones, Alta Spells, Meredith Edwards, Jason Carroll, Melissa Alonso, Madeline Holcombe, Joe Sutton and Keith Allen contributed to this report.