Louisville Police Department has released bodycam footage showing the moment cops confronted the shooter, Connor Sturgeon, during Monday morning’s mass shooting. As we previously reported, the 25-year-old entered the Old National Bank building in downtown Louisville, Kentucky at around 8:30 AM before opening fire and killing five people while injuring close to a dozen others. Sturgeon, who cops have described as a “suicidal” employee at the branch, had sent a string of disturbing messages from his phone before the attack that strongly indicated he had plans to harm himself.
Video footage released of police arriving at the bank shows the intense moment officers encounter the gunman as gunshots are heard throughout the nine-minute-long clip. Officer Cory Galloway was grazed on his left side by a bullet while Nickolas Wilt was reportedly shot in the head and rushed to a nearby hospital. Wilt had only been out of the police academy for 10 days and is now fighting for his life after he rushed in to stop the bank mass shooter kill any other potential victims.
RELATED: Police Body Camera Footage Shows Fatal Shooting Of Teenager In Washington, D.C
“I am just truly proud of the heroic actions of those two officers,” Louisville Police Chief Jacquelyn Gwinn-Villaroel said in a statement. The bodycam footage is mostly taken from Galloway’s device, with police deputy chief Paul Humphrey describing how challenging it was for officers to take Sturgeon out since he was in an elevated position inside the building. “He could see out where no one could see in,” Humphrey said. Galloway, however, manages to shoot at Sturgeon before saying he believed the shooter was down.
“You can see the tension in that video,” Humphrey said. “You can understand the stress those officers are going through. The response wasn’t perfect but it was exactly the response we needed.”
Jefferson County Coroner’s Office confirmed on Tuesday that five victims in total had died of “multiple gunshot wounds,” with their deaths ruled as a homicide. Joshua Barrick, 40; Thomas Elliott, 63; Juliana Farmer, 45; and James Tutt, 64 — were the first victims confirmed to have been killed in the shooting. Deana Eckert, 57, was said to have been transported to a hospital where she died on Monday night.
“I’m weary,” Jason Smith, who is the chief medical officer at the University of Louisville Health, said. “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’ or ‘daddy.’ It just becomes too hard, day in and day out, to be able to do that.”