NEW YORK: A leading advocacy group has urge a probe of possible racial or ethnic hatred after half of the eight workers shot dead at an Indianapolis FedEx facility by a former employee belonged to the Sikh religious community,
Law enforcement officials said they have yet to determine what motivated the gunman, 19-year-old Brandon Hole, who was white, to carry out Thursday night’s rampage, at a FedEx operations center near Indianapolis International Airport.
The attack in Indiana’s state capital, the third most populous city in the Midwest, was the latest in a spate of at least seven deadly mass shootings in the United States over the past month.
It came a little over a year after Hole was briefly placed under psychiatric detention by police when his mother reported her concerns that he was contemplating “suicide by cop,” according to the FBI. A shotgun was seized from his home.
FBI agents who interviewed the teenager last April found no criminal violation at the time and determined he possessed no “racially motivated violent extremism ideology,” said Paul Keenan, special agent in charge of the FBI’s Indianapolis field office.
The New York-based Sikh Coalition, a civil rights advocacy group, called for a full investigation into “the possibility of bias as factor” in the FedEx killings.
Four members of the Sikh faith – three women and a man – were among the dead the shooting spree, and at least one Sikh individual was wounded, said Gurinder Singh Khalsa, a businessman and leader of the local Sikh community who said he was briefed by victims’ families.
Singh Khalsa also told a new agency the majority of employees at the FedEx site are Sikhs, whose religion originated in the Punjab region of the Indian subcontinent.
He said the FedEx center was known for hiring older members of the local Sikh community who did not necessarily speak fluent English. The Sikh Coalition’s executive director, Satjeet Kaur, said more than 8,000 Sikh-Americans live in Indiana.
The eight people killed ranged in age from 19 to 74. The shooting lasted only a couple of minutes and was over by the time police responded to the scene, said Indianapolis police department’s deputy chief Craig McCartt.
Witnesses described a chaotic attack, as the gunman opened fire with a rifle in the parking lot before entering the facility and continuing to shoot, leaving victims both inside and outside the building. Officers found the suspect dead of an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound.
