New Delhi: Kentucky’s killer bank employee Connor Sturgeon, 25, knew he was going to be fired from his job on Monday.
Before walking into office, he wrote a note to his parents and a friend indicating he would open fire in the Old National Bank in downtown Louisville, Kentucky.
Sturgeon shot at fellow employees around 8.30 am, killing five and injuring eight others. Some of his colleagues at that time had assembled for the morning meeting, and the bank had not opened to the public.
Though Sturgeon was described as “extremely intelligent”, CNN reported that he had “struggled to fit in before he joined the team at Old National Bank and was on the brink of being terminated when he entered the bank with a rifle”.
Sturgeon, who had worked for the bank for more than a year, had interned for three consecutive summers between 2018 and 2020 before joining full time in 2021.
He was shot dead by the police the moment he took aim at them, but not before live-streaming the attack on Instagram.
Sturgeon graduated from the University of Alabama in December 2020, and participated in an accelerated master’s program, earning both his bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree in finance at the same time, spokesperson Shane Dorrill told CNN.
In a Louisville suburb high school, he played basketball, ran track and was named a semifinalist for a National Merit Scholarship in 2015.
A former high school classmate, who knew Sturgeon and his family well, said “he was a really good kid who came from a really good family”.
“This is a total shock,” CNN quoted the former classmate, who also said he never saw any “sort of red flag or signal that this could ever happen”.
A manager at the bank said Sturgeon had a “monotone personality. His temperament is pretty low key. I’ve never seen the kid get angry or upset about anything in public. He was pretty much just relaxed.”
In a 2018 college essay, however, Sturgeon had apparently written about how he had trouble fitting in at school. “My self-esteem has long been a problem for me,” the online essay read. “As a late bloomer in middle and high school, I struggled to a certain extent to fit in, and this has given me a somewhat negative self-image that persists today. Making friends has never been especially easy, so I have more experience than most in operating alone.”
Sturgeon wrote that in college, he had “begun to mature socially and am beginning to see improvement in this area,” and that he hoped to “be more self-aware and start becoming a ‘better’ person.”
Media reports — following the shooting – said Connor Sturgeon had a long history of posting about politics, sports and video games on social media.
The Daily Beast said a Twitter account in his name, now removed, posted in support of Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 and criticised police violence.
A Reddit account by the same handle, also removed, posted political memes mocking Donald Trump and his supporters, as well as Fox News.
In 2018, he replied to a thread about severe depression saying: “Hey man, I understand how rough it is, and how pointless life can seem. Just keep fighting. Keep grinding.”
Also read: Bank worker kills five colleagues, injures 9 in Louisville, Kentucky shooting, say police
Source: The Print
