Indianapolis shooting: Sikh community mourns four members of FedEx plant

Walia said four of the eight victims were Sikhs.

The community has grown in Indiana over the past few years, he said. When he moved to the area in 1999, there were about 50 families in the area. There are now more than 10,000 families who have come to Indianapolis for economic opportunities and good schools, Walia said.

“It’s a tragedy for all of us and we are all family,” he said. “We are neighbors. We will do everything in our power to help heal our city in the coming weeks and months. It is not as if it is going to disappear.”

The attack is at least the 45th mass shooting in the U.S. since the shooting incident in Atlanta in the area on March 16. CNN considers an incident to be a mass shooting when four or more people, with the exception of the gunman, are wounded or killed.

It’s the deadliest shooting since ten people were killed on March 22 in a grocery store in Boulder, Colorado.

How the night unfolded

According to police, the shooting lasted only a few minutes.

It started when the gunman “got out of his car and quickly started firing randomly outside the facility,” Deputy Police Chief Craig McCartt said.

The gunman then “went in and did not get very far into the facility at all,” while shooting others there, McCartt said.

She waited until he entered so she could drive away without attracting the shooter’s attention. She went to another parking lot and called the police. She said she was trying to warn other workers who were arriving that there had been a shooting. Some stopped and others drove past her.

Investigators heard that the shooting “lasted only a few minutes – that it did not last very long,” McCartt said.

“My understanding is that by the time officers enter … the situation was over – that the suspect took his life shortly before officers entered the facility,” McCartt told reporters.

There were at least 100 people in the facility when the shooting started, he said. Many were during their dinner or changing shifts.

Four people were found dead outside and four others, without the shooting computer, were killed inside, McCartt said.

Police want to understand the motive

McCartt identified the gunman Friday afternoon as 19-year-old Brandon Hole, who was last employed by FedEx in 2020.

In March 2020, Hole’s mother told law enforcement that he might attempt an attempted suicide by a ‘police officer’, the FBI’s office in Indianapolis said in a statement.

Paul Keenan, special agent in charge, said Hole was immediately placed by the Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department in an immediate interim position for mental health. He also said a shotgun was seized in Hole’s home.

“Based on items observed in the suspect’s bedroom at the time, he was questioned by the FBI in April 2020,” the statement said. “No racially motivated violent extremism (RMVE) ideology was identified during the assessment and no criminal offense was found. The shotgun was not returned to the suspect.”

McCartt told reporters that police in Indianapolis found Hole’s name in two incident reports. The deputy principal did not have information on the first report. The details he described in a 2020 report are consistent with the FBI statement.

Asked what the alleged gunman had brought to the FedEx facility around 11pm on Thursday, McCartt said: “I wish we could answer that.”