Families who were shopping at the Arkansas grocery where four people were killed and nine others were wounded during a mass shooting on Friday reportedly hid in the freezer as they desperately tried to stay out of the attacker’s view, according to reports.
The chilling details emerged as authorities identified the alleged shooter and the people slain at the Mad Butcher store in Fordyce.
Callie Weems, 23; Roy Sturgis, 50; Shirley Taylor, 62; and Ellen Shrum, 81, were all killed.
Weems was a nurse who worked at the Dallas county, Arkansas, medical center, according to what her mother, Helen Browning, told the local news station KLRT.
She was reportedly shopping on her day off from work when she was shot to death, and her survivors include a 10-month-old daughter.
Browning told KLRT that she had an ominous feeling when she could not get in touch with Weems after news of the shooting circulated. She said she hoped Weems had just travelled to the hospital to assist her co-workers responding to the mass shooting.
“My best friend was standing right there and I said … ‘Tell me my baby’s OK,’ and she said: ‘I can’t,’” Helen Browning recounted to KLRT. “And that’s when I just broke.
“I just want my baby back.”
Weems’s family reported Sturgis was another relative of theirs, the father of a niece.
Meanwhile, citing information provided by her daughter, Angela Atchley, KTHV described Taylor as a grandmother who doted on her children and grandchildren, especially through her love of cooking.
“She was the hardest-working woman ever,” Atchley said, according to KTHV.
CNN interviewed Katrina Doherty, 39, about how she hid in the grocery store freezer with her 18-year-old daughter and four-year-old son after the shooting erupted. She said she was not able to find an escape route after hearing up to 10 gunshots.
She said she had no cellphone service to call police, and others in the freezer were praying and crying as they tried to listen to what was happening in the store.
“We were just sitting there and praying. I was in panic mode,” Doherty said to CNN. “My son about froze to death. We tried to get him quiet, but he was saying he wanted his daddy.
“It felt like we were in there forever. We were in there maybe 15 minutes. I was asking the Lord to protect over everybody. I was just praying. The other lady, she was praying. She was crying.”
The workers at one point saw a dead person outside the freezer door. The group in the freezer remained there until one of the store employees heard police outside, and they were then all escorted out of the store.
According to the meat manager of the store, Matthew Gill, a man entered the grocery with a shotgun before exchanging gunfire with police who arrived at the scene to confront him.
Deputies with the Dallas county sheriff’s office as well as Arkansas state police arrived at the store about 11.30am on Friday. In addition to the four people killed, two law enforcement officers and seven civilians were wounded in the ensuing gunfire, authorities said.
A Fordyce police officer, James Johnson, 31, was released from the hospital on Saturday evening after being treated for a gunshot wound. A Stuttgart police officer, John Hudson, 24, also received treatment for minor injuries.
Authorities identified the suspected attacker as 44-year-old Travis Eugene Posey. Posey, from New Edinburg, Arkansas. He had a graze wound to his head from the shootout with police, according to investigators.
Officers booked him into jail on counts of capital murder, with more charges pending.
Helen Browning reportedly has known Posey since he was a child, the local news station KTHV said.
“I just want to know why Joey Posey woke up this morning and decided he needed to go ruin families’ lives,” Browning told KLRT.
There had been nearly 240 mass shootings in the US so far this year as of Saturday evening – an average of more than one daily, according to the Gun Violence Archive.
That tally included a shooting at a nightclub in Louisville, Kentucky, early on Saturday that killed one person and wounded seven, officials said.
Also, early Sunday, 10 people were wounded in a shooting in Columbus, Ohio.
The online archive defines a mass shooting as an incident in which four or more shooting victims are wounded or killed.
Such a high daily rate of mass shootings in the US has prompted some public calls for more substantial gun control. But the federal government for the most part has been unwilling or unable to heed those calls.
Fordyce is a city with a population of about 3,200 people. It is about 65 miles (105km) south of Little Rock, the state capital of Arkansas.
