A man shot dead four people and wounded nine others in an attack on Monday at a bank in downtown Louisville, Ky., city officials said. The shooter was fatally shot at the scene, the city’s police department said, but it was unclear whether from police gunfire or a self-inflicted wound.
The shooter was a current or former employee of the bank, Paul Humphrey, a Louisville Metro Police Department deputy chief, told reporters.
“We believe this is a lone gunman involved in this that did have a connection to the bank,” Humphrey said. “We’re trying to establish what that connection was to the business, but it appears he was a previous employee.”
Police said they responded within minutes to reports of an attacker around 8:30 a.m. at an Old National Bank branch near Slugger Field baseball stadium in the city’s downtown. Officers fired at the shooter, police said.
The man was armed with an “AR-15-style” semiautomatic rifle, CNN reported, citing an unnamed federal law enforcement official.
Nine people wounded in the attack were treated at the University of Louisville hospital, a hospital spokesperson said, including two police officers. One of the police officers was in critical condition, police said.
“We will come together as a community to work to prevent these horrific acts of gun violence from continuing here and around the state,” Craig Greenberg, mayor of the city of 625,000, told reporters at a briefing.
Kentucky governor knew victims
Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear, on the verge of tears, said during the briefing that he knew some of the victims.
“This is awful,” he said. “I have a very close friend that didn’t make it today. And I have another close friend who didn’t either, and one who’s at the hospital that I hope is going to make it through.”
It was the second time that Beshear was personally touched by a mass tragedy since becoming governor. In late 2021, one of the towns devastated by tornadoes that tore through Kentucky was Dawson Springs, the hometown of Beshear’s father.
Humphrey said the actions of responding police officers in Louisville on Monday morning had undoubtedly saved lives.
“This is a tragic event,” he said. “But it was it was the heroic response of officers that made sure that no more people were more seriously injured than what happened.”
Mass shootings have become recurrent in the United States. So far this year, there have been 146 mass shootings — using the definition of four or more shot or killed, not including the shooter — according to the Gun Violence Archive, a non-profit group.
In one of the most recent high-profile incidents, three nine-year-old students and three staff members were killed by a former student at a Christian elementary school in Nashville, Tenn., on March 27.
