The Louisville Metro Police Department has released bodycam footage of a police officer who was involved in apprehending an active shooter at a bank in the city’s downtown. The video shows chaotic moments after the police reached the spot after the mass shooting. As the officers could not see the first shooter, he fired a hail of bullets at them. According to police, the videos were taken from the lapels of the two injured officers and offer a rare perspective of police officers responding to the massacre. The shooter killed five people and injured eight others on Monday.
One, a rookie officer, was shot in the head within minutes of arriving on the scene, as his partner was hit by a bullet and sought cover while trying to pin down the shooter. In a new conference call Tuesday, Deputy Chief Paul Humphrey of the Louisville Metro Police Department looked at reporters through edited footage and still photos and praised the responding officers for their heroism. According to a chronology provided by the police, they received a call about shots fired at the Old National Bank at 8.38 a.m. and two officers arrived three minutes later. They had just stepped out of the patrol car when the gunman opened fire on them. “Back up, back up, back up,” an officer shouted amid gunshots in the background.
A still image from the surveillance video shows the 25-year-old shooter, who worked at the bank, dressed in jeans, a blue button-down shirt and sneakers, surrounded by broken glass inside the building. He had already shot several people inside, and police said he set up the ambush to attack the officers. Humphrey said the front doors were glass, high off the sidewalk, and because of reflections, officers could not see the shooter inside. But he could see them. Officer Corey Galloway pulled a rifle from the trunk of the patrol car. “Cover for me,” he said, and he reported to dispatch that shots had been fired.
Galloway was training rookie officer Nicholas Wilt, who had just graduated from the police academy 10 days earlier. Video showed them walking up the stairs toward the front door when the gunman opened fire. Wilt was shot in the head, although he was not captured on video. Police said Galloway was hit in the shoulder. His body camera showed that he fell and then hid behind a concrete planter at the bottom of a staircase leading to the building. The sirens of dozens of police cars coming towards them could be heard in the background.
“The shooter has an angle on that officer,” he said in the video recording. “We have to get out of there. I don’t know where he is, the glass is blocking him.” A video taken by a bystander, also released by police on Tuesday, shows him darting back and forth from one side of the planter to the other as he tries to fire at the gunman.
He waited, and as other officers arrived, more gunshots were heard and glass shattered. Galloway fired towards the gunman at 8:44 a.m., three minutes after arriving. “I think I knocked him down! I think he’s down!? He yelled. Suspect down! Get the officer in!” He stepped forward into the building, and shards of glass shattered beneath his feet. The video then showed Galloway approaching the suspect, who was lying on the ground inside the lobby next to a long rifle.
Humphrey said Wilt was taken to the hospital in the back of a police car. In the chaotic first minutes, police treated the victims and left them inside. Humphrey said the ambulance service was short-staffed, so a police lieutenant drove the ambulance while emergency workers treated people at the scene. On Tuesday, Wilt’s condition was serious but stable, according to Dr. Jason Smith, chief medical officer at University of Louisville Hospital. Smith said two of the four injured still in hospital had non-life-threatening injuries.
Louisville Mayor Craig Greenberg said the release of the footage was important because ‘transparency is important’ is even more important in times of crisis. Police Chief Jacqueline Givin-Villaroel said at a news conference that 25-year-old bank employee Connor Sturgeon had purchased the AR-15 assault-style rifle used in the April 4 attack at a local dealership. Activists ‘including a close friend of the governor of Kentucky’ livestreaming the attack.
The shooting, the 15th mass killing in the country this year, comes just two weeks after a former student killed three children and three adults at a Christian elementary school in Nashville, Tennessee, about 160 miles (260 kilometers) to the south. In Louisville, five employees of Old National Bank were killed: Joshua Barrick, 40, a senior vice president; Tommy Elliott, 63, also a senior vice president; Jim Tutt Jr., 64, a commercial real estate market executive; Juliana Farmer, 45, a credit analyst; and Dina Eckert, 57, an executive administrative officer. The mayor urged unity as the community processes its grief over this shooting and the many other spasms of gun violence that have shocked this city. (With PTI inputs)