Just got home from the scene of the United States' latest mass shooting. Now there's a sentence you never want to be able to write. This morning, a soon to be former employee walked into Old National Bank in downtown Louisville and opened fire with an AR-15.
The gunman, a 25 year old man, shot thirteen people, four fatally before he was killed by police. Two police officers were among the wounded, one of them in critical condition after taking a round to the head.
From what I've heard, the officer in critical condition was only a couple weeks out of the academy. It appears to have been a targeted attack, all four of the dead were executives at the bank.
When I got word of what happened I grabbed my camera and headed down there. Didn't really know what to expect, what does one expect when going to a mass shooting?
Surreal. That's the closest I can come to describing it. It was a beautiful spring day, the sun was shining, the birds were singing, and we were standing just a couple hundred yards from where five people had just died.
The shooter apparently livestreamed the whole thing on Instagram, from what I've heard it was the police that ended the stream. A bank manager got to watch it all unfold in a Microsoft Teams meeting. Who needs Westerns when you're stuck in the modern adaptation?
As if this wasn't bad enough, we got word that two more people had been shot a few blocks away at the local technical college, one fatally. That shooting was unrelated to this one, and the shooter in that case is still at large. Kept hearing rumors of a third shooting but as of yet have been able to find no details to confirm that.
As I was writing this I just got word that another person has died and that it is actually three LMPD officers that were wounded. Earlier in the day I'd heard that one of the officers had died but as of yet that does not seem to be the case.
The building the bank is in also contains other offices and apartments. Kentucky's governor, Andy Beshear ran his campaign for office from the building and was close friends with two of the people that died.
It just feels insane and unreal, the last big mass shooting was just 150 miles down I-65 in Nashville two weeks ago, and now it's our turn. They told us in rehab that doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results was the definition of insanity, which seems to sum up our approach to mass shootings.
If you look close you can see evidence markers in the photo above. Wish we had evidence this was going to end soon.
When I finally left this afternoon, I didn't even have to travel a block before I ran into the rest of the world carrying on as if nothing had happened. The dissonance of that is something that I'm still trying to wrap my head around.
All in all it made for a proper Monday from Hell. Y'all stay safe out there.