Louisville shooting at Old National Bank underscores the fatigue felt by nation

When the call came that Mercy was needed back at work, she’d barely recovered from a previous assignment that had taken her nearly 200 miles from home.

That trip came late last month, when handlers for Mercy – a 9-year-old golden retriever – drove the dog from her home in Louisville to Nashville, where she was among half a dozen crisis dogs brought in to comfort more than 350 children following The Covenant School shooting that left six people dead, including three 9-year-olds.

This week’s call came Monday. While the specifics had changed – the setting was a bank this time, and the body count, five – and Mercy's commute was shorter, much of the scene was familiar: the shattered glass, the tear-streaked faces, the heartbroken city, the arguments of what’s to blame and how to fix it.

Sherry Ederheimer, one of Mercy’s handlers, said even the comfort dogs are exhausted by America’s barrage of mass shootings. After Nashville, “Mercy got tired and a little bit stressed. She slept in the car all the way home, even had puppy dreams where they yip in their sleep. She needed to rest.”

It’s a familiar sentiment in Louisville, a city plagued by rising violence, headed by a new mayor who last year survived a shooting, and whose next headline-making shooting – this time at Jefferson Community & Technical College – occurred less than two hours after Monday’s at downtown’s Old National Bank.

But the fatigue isn’t just local. It’s nationwide.

“Nashville, you are now ‘old news’ as our fair city of Louisville is in the national spotlight only days after the horrendous shooting deaths in your town,” said Bryan Carter, a professor at the University of Louisville School of Medicine, in a letter to the Courier Journal this week. “Who will be next in the headlines in the days to come?”

The consensus seems to be that where the next mass shooting will happen is tough to predict. Not so much the when.

“This is happening again tonight somewhere. This is happening tomorrow somewhere,” predicted Caleb Goodlett, whose wife Emily called him during Monday’s shooting while she was tucked inside a cash vault in the bank, hiding from the gunman.

'This is hard.': Louisville mourns Old National Bank victims, calls for change at vigil

There’s still the question of precisely what happened Monday, though, which investigators continue working to piece together, an effort aided by the mid-week release of 911 calls that provided disparate perspectives on the chaotic morning that left five Old National Bank employees dead.

Killed in the shooting were Josh Barrick, 40; Julianna Farmer, 45; Deanna Eckert, 57; Tommy Elliott, 63, and Jim Tutt Jr., 64. Eight more people were injured, including rookie Louisville Metropolitan Police Officer Nickolas Wilt, who was shot in the head.

It's so far unclear whether the shooter targeted those victims specifically. Closed-circuit images captured inside the bank show the gunman roaming its halls in jeans and tennis shoes. He live-streamed the attack on Instagram Live; his account has since been removed.

Whatever motive might ultimately be ascribed to him won’t change much for the families of his victims, who were remembered as “always friendly” (Eckert); “a ray of sunshine” (Farmer); “a son of Louisville” (Elliott); “a sweet, gentle, soft-spoken guy” (Barrick); and a man “willing to do anything to bring a smile” to children’s faces (Tutt).

To their loved ones, the violent deaths are unthinkable. But that, too, is a familiar refrain.

"You may think this will never happen to you … to your friends or loved ones," said Louisville Mayor Craig Greenberg, who was grazed by a bullet in a shooting last year at his campaign headquarters in a case still unfolding in courts. "I used to think that. The sad truth is that now no one in our city, no one in our state, no one in our country has that luxury anymore."

Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear sounded emotionally drained as he spoke to media after the shooting.

“Acts like this tear at the very fabric of humanity, of who we are, and certainly of who we want to be," he said. "I admit that while I’m not angry, I’m empty and I’m sad. And I just keep thinking that maybe we’ll wake up."

Beshear said he personally knew one of the injured victims and was close friends with Elliott, who was among the slain.

"What I know is I just wish I’d taken an extra moment, made an extra call, tell him how much I cared about him," Beshear said.

It all happened so fast.

Wilt and Officer Cory Galloway arrived at the scene within 3 minutes of the first 911 call, which was logged at 8:36 a.m. That call was from a woman who’d been attending a virtual meeting with bank colleagues and had seen the shooting unfold via a meeting streamed on Microsoft Teams.

By the time Galloway and Wilt arrived at the bank, the mother of the shooter – identified as Connor Sturgeon – had also called, apparently alerted by her son’s roommate that Sturgeon had left a note in their shared home relaying that he was headed to the bank with a gun. The 911 dispatcher dissuaded Sturgeon’s mother from heading to the bank, saying that police had already arrived and the situation was dangerous.

Clearly unaware of the horrific scene unfolding downtown, Sturgeon's mother said she was shaking and pleaded with the dispatcher not to "punish" her son, who by then was likely already engaged in a gunfight with responding officers.

Based on Galloway’s body-camera footage, within a minute of his and Wilt's arrival at the bank, Sturgeon opened fire on them, felling Wilt. Minutes later, as Galloway returned fire, a bullet struck and killed Sturgeon, a 25-year-old bank employee who police said bought the weapon he used – an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle – six days before the shooting.

As with many of the mass shooters in America, Sturgeon’s motive is murky. While some media outlets initially said that he'd learned he soon would be fired from the bank, Greenberg told reporters that wasn’t the case.

Sturgeon’s family released a statement describing “mental health challenges” that he and his family “were actively addressing,” but they added that “there were never any warning signs or indications he was capable of this shocking act.”

The morning of the shooting, Sturgeon’s mother repeatedly told an emergency dispatcher that he didn’t own weapons, wasn’t violent and was “a really good kid.”

Nothing uncovered in initial dives into Sturgeon’s background would suggest a reason for her to think otherwise. He grew up in Southern Indiana and graduated from Floyd Central High School, about 12 miles northwest of Louisville, where he was named a National Merit Scholar in 2016, according to the Jackson County Banner, a weekly newspaper in Indiana.

At Floyd Central, he played basketball for his father, Todd Sturgeon, who’d been hired as a social studies teacher and head coach in 2014 until his retirement last year. The older Sturgeon, who’d previously worked as a coach for the University of Indianapolis, told reporters after his hiring that “the opportunity to coach my own sons” was his motivation to accept the job. At the time, Connor Sturgeon was entering the school as a 6-foot-4 starter who’d lettered in track and basketball as a sophomore, while a younger brother was in the middle school feeder program.

By all accounts, Connor Sturgeon was a solid athlete, described as “almost unguardable” in one 2015 Courier Journal story. Photographs from the time show him wearing a helmet on the court, which a friend told the Daily Beast was due to multiple concussions Sturgeon had suffered while playing football. Peter Palmer, a lawyer for the family, said Thursday that they planned to have Sturgeon tested for CTE, Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, which is the deterioration of the brain caused by repeated head trauma. The condition has been linked with violent and impulsive behavior, according to the Mayo Clinic.

But this part of the story is overly familiar, too, with authorities and family members trying to figure out the why in a situation that is, at its core, senseless.

While Sturgeon left a note, police haven’t released its contents. He had no history of major legal run-ins, per Kentucky and Indiana court records. His case appears somewhat unique in that, unlike many of the alleged culprits in mass shootings nationwide, he wasn’t seen as a loner. His mother referenced both a girlfriend and a roommate in her 911 call, and Sturgeon’s name appeared in multiple Courier Journal stories covering his basketball games.

Sturgeon was educated, earning both bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of Alabama. His coworkers called him intelligent and said his wrath on Monday was as shocking as it was brutal.

Aside from grief, the town this week has seemed most heavily weighed by exhaustion.

"I'm weary," Dr. Jason Smith, a trauma surgeon and Chief Medical Officer at the University of Louisville Hospital, told reporters in a shaky voice Tuesday. "There's only so many times you can walk into a room and tell someone they're not coming home tomorrow. And it just breaks your heart when you hear someone screaming, 'Mommy. Daddy.' It just becomes too hard day in and day out to be able to do that."

Caleb Goodlett said he's tired, too, of the "back and forth."

“It’s not a ‘us versus them’ mentality. It's not red (or) blue," he said. "What are we going to do to stop this from occurring again tonight, from occurring tomorrow, a year from now? I don’t know.”

Muhammad Babar, president of Muslim Americans for Compassion and Doctors for Healthy Communities, expressed similar frustration.

"I’m dead tired of posting hollow words and prayers on the social media after each incident of mass shooting," he said before a crowd of mourners this week.

After his speech, he told The Courier Journal: “I think that our collective inaction is causing all these deaths around us. I don’t care whatever solution we come up with, but we need to do something. It will not be a perfect solution, but it will be a step in the right direction.”

Babar's comments came during a Wednesday night vigil attended by hundreds of mourners – Mercy the dog among them. She was joined by two canine colleagues with the Lutheran Church Charities Comfort Dog program, while other furry friends from a similar program called Canines for Christ also were on hand.

Ederheimer, Mercy’s handler, said that while every one of these shootings is heartbreakingly unique, there’s a sameness to them, too. Mercy, however briefly, seems to absorb some of the trauma the humans around her are enduring. Ederheimer provides stuffed Comfort Dogs, bearing Mercy’s name on their bandanas, to people impacted by the events, and Mercy is “paid” afterward with a massage and brushing.

In each shooting, Ederheimer said, “there are differences, but there are a lot of similarities.”

Reporters Olivia Evans, Lucas Aulbach, Andrew Wolfson and Rae Johnson contributed to this report.

This article originally appeared on Louisville Courier Journal: Louisville shooting at Old National Bank underscores national fatigue