Details are beginning to emerge about the dead in the FedEx shooting in Indianapolis, where one of the victims had just earned his first salary.
Karli Smith, 19, had “started to get tight and get a job and take life a little more seriously,” said a relative of the young woman, one of eight killed after a former employee opened fire on the facility. lions of Indianapolis Thursday night.
“She was a beautiful, beautiful, young teenager,” the family member told Indianapolis Star of Smith, who graduated from high school last year.
Samaria Blackwell, also 19, had joined FedEx just two months ago.
She was “such a fun and loving daughter of our family’s baby,” her parents Jeff and Tammi Blackwell said in a statement.
Matthew Alexander, 32, a former student at Butler University in Indianapolis, played baseball at Avon High School, where he was a member of the National Honor Society.
“He was a wonderful brother, son, grandson, nephew, cousin and friend. He was only 32 and had a good career at FedEx. He was kind, kind, he liked sports and he was really one of the “good guys,” cousin Sheryl Richardson wrote on Facebook. “If you knew him, you’d like him. you will miss him. “
John Steven Weisert, 74, had been married for 50 years when he was murdered by a “sick and depraved human being to take revenge on a former businessman,” his son Mike wrote on social media.
“I do not understand and will never understand the reason for this type of random violence. He was a good man. He was a great father. He was a wonderfully devoted and faithful husband of almost 50 years to my mother. And he was a man who worked very hard throughout his life to provide the best home he could for his family, ”wrote Mike Weisert.
Shooter Brandon Scott Hole began his fury in the FedEx parking lot, where he began randomly firing the gun and killing four people before heading to the building, according to police.
Once inside, he killed four more people, before shooting and killing himself. Hole had last worked for the company in 2020.
Police have not yet specified what type of gun Hole used, identifying the weapon only as an “assault rifle” and refusing to give further details when it reached The Post.
An eyewitness, FedEx employee Levi Miller told the “Today” program on Friday that the shooter was “a hooded figure” who “had an AR in his hand.”
Among the victims were four members of Indiana’s growing Sikh community, including Amarjit Sekhon. The mother of two boys, ages 22 and 16, 48, had just started work at the FedEx facility in November.
“She was a worker, she always worked, she worked,” her brother-in-law Kuldip Sekhon said.
Jasvinder Kaur, 50, had a daughter and a son and had moved to the United States in 2018. He sent money from his job to FedEx to help keep his son in India, according to the Indy Star.
Jaswinder Singh was 68 years old. His family told Indian media that Singh had moved to the United States eight years ago.
It’s “very sad,” Dalbar Singh, Singh’s nephew, told Republic World.
Amarjeet Kaur Johal, 66, was a grandmother who planned to take a double shift on Thursday in order to get out on Friday, according to a grandson’s Twitter account.
“I have several family members working at the particular facility and they are traumatized,” the grandson wrote.
The fact that so many of the victims were Sikhs provoked outrage and called for action against those targeted at people of color.
“It was no coincidence that the shooter ran this particular FedEx facility where he had worked and knew he was overwhelmed by Sikhs,” the Sikh national coalition said in a statement on Saturday.
“This was not a crime of convenience or a spur attack of the moment. It was a methodical planning and selection that echoes the orientation of Asian American spa rooms in Atlanta exactly one month ago.