Crime & Justice

Man who killed 8 at FedEx facility in US was former employee

Washington, Apr 16 (EFE).- The man who killed eight people and wounded five others at a FedEx facility in the midwestern US city of Indianapolis before taking his own life has been identified as a 19-year-old former employee of the global shipping giant, police said Friday.

Brandon Hole last worked at the facility in 2020, the Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department’s deputy chief of investigations, Craig McCartt, told a press conference.

Authorities don’t know the circumstances of Hole’s departure from FedEx, McCartt said.

It was around 11:00 pm Thursday when Hole emerged from his car in the building’s parking lot “and pretty quickly started some random shooting,” the deputy chief said.

The attacker then entered the facility near Indianapolis International Airport and shot additional people before turning the gun – believed to be a rifle – on himself.

Police did not fire any shots, McCartt said.

“My understanding is, by the time that officers entered … the situation was over – that the suspect took his life very shortly before officers entered the facility,” he said.

As many as 100 people were in the parking lot and entrance area because the shooting coincided with the end of one shift and start of another, McCartt said.

The facility has more than 4,500 employees in all.

Investigators from the Indianapolis police and the FBI were still trying to determine a motive for the massacre, even as the work of identifying the victims continued.

Hole’s name appeared in several police reports from 2020 and earlier, McCartt said, without providing any details.

Separately, the FBI field office disclosed that agents interviewed Hole in April 2020 pursuant to objects found in his room during a police search.

Indianapolis officers carried out the search after Hole’s mother ‘contacted law enforcement to report he might try to commit ‘suicide by cop,'” FBI Special Agent in Charge Paul Keenan said in a statement.

Neither the police nor the FBI detected any “criminal violation” by Hole on that occasion, Keenan said.

“We must guard against resignation or even despair – the assumption that this is simply how it must be and that we might as well get used to it. We need the courage that compels courageous acts that push past weariness,” Indianapolis Mayor Joe Hogsett said in the wake of the latest atrocity “driven by readily accessible guns.”

Thursday’s bloodbath gave further impetus to the debate over gun control in the United States.

President Joe Biden described the violence in Indianapolis as “just the latest in a string of tragedies, following closely after gunmen firing bullets in broad daylight at spas in and around Atlanta, Ga., a grocery store in Boulder, Colo., a home in Rock Hill, S.C., and so many other shootings.”

“Gun violence is an epidemic in America,” he said in a statement. “We should not accept it. We must act.”

The Democratic president recently enacted several modest gun-control measures via executive action while urging Congress to pass new legislation to address a scourge that claims 106 lives a day in the US.

Despite lockdowns for the Covid-19 pandemic, 2020 was the deadliest year in two decades for gun violence in the US. EFE

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