Louisville is set to host a vigil Wednesday to let community members grieve the five people killed this week in a downtown bank shooting, as the public absorbs fresh details that investigators are releasing about how the massacre unfolded.
The vigil comes a day after police released dramatic police body camera footage of Monday’s shooting at Old National Bank, in which authorities say a 25-year-old employee opened fire on his colleagues who were in a staff meeting and then engaged in a shootout with police before he was shot dead.
The attacker killed five of his coworkers around 8:30 a.m. in Kentucky’s most populous city, about 30 minutes before the facility was to open, a gruesome assault that the shooter livestreamed online, authorities said. Several others were hospitalized, including a rookie police officer who was shot in the head and was in critical condition Tuesday.
“Our city is heartbroken,” Louisville Mayor Craig Greenberg told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer on Tuesday evening. “These five victims should not be dead – just like everyone else who was killed by gun violence in our city, in our country, should not be dead.”
Police say they’re still trying to determine the shooter’s motive. As an investigation continues, officials expect to release audio Wednesday of 911 calls about the shooting, the mayor said.
And the city will hold a vigil at 5 p.m. Wednesday at the Muhammad Ali Center in Louisville, the mayor said.
The vigil will “acknowledge the wounds, physical and emotional, that gun violence leaves behind,” Greenberg told reporters Tuesday. “It will be an interfaith opportunity for our entire community to come together – to grieve, to heal, to begin to move forward.”
What the body camera footage shows On Tuesday, Louisville police released bodycam video from the officers who responded to yet another mass shooting in the US.
The public footage begins with a video from Officer Nickolas Wilt – a 26-year-old rookie who’d graduated from a police academy just 10 days prior – who drove up to the scene with his training officer, Cory “CJ” Galloway.
As Wilt ran toward the gunshots that officers faced upon arrival, Wilt was shot in the head, police said. The released version of Wilt’s footage cuts off before he is shot.
Body camera footage from Galloway shows him taking fire, and then retreating to a safe position behind a planter as officers talk about how they can’t see the gunman, and that the gunman is shooting through windows in the front of the bank. At some point, Galloway was also shot.Police eventually took down the shooter after he broke the bank’s lobby glass windows, giving officers a vision on his location, Deputy Chief Paul Humphrey said. The entire situation – from when the gunman began firing his assault weapon to when he was killed by police – lasted for about nine minutes, according to Louisville police Lt. Col. Aaron Cromwell .