“One of the four people killed in Friday morning’s mass shooting at the Mad Butcher grocery store in Fordyce was shot while attempting to render aid to another victim, Col. Mike Hagar of the Arkansas State Police said at a press conference Sunday.
Callie Weems, 23, was a nurse and the mother of a 10-month-old child. Rather than fleeing the scene when the shooting started, Hagar said, “Callie Weems began using her training as a nurse to render aid to a gunshot victim and unfortunately became a victim herself as a result of her selfless actions.”
Fifteen people were injured by gunfire on Friday, including two law enforcement officers and the suspect, Travis Eugene Posey, who survived after being wounded by police. (State police identified an additional shooting victim late Saturday, bringing the total from 14 to 15, the agency announced Sunday.) The three others killed were Shirley Taylor, 62; Roy Sturgis, 50; and Ellen Shrum, 81.
Posey, 44, is being held at the Ouachita County Detention Center in Camden.
On Sunday, Hagar provided more details about how events unfolded Friday. Posey was carrying a 12-gauge shotgun and a pistol, he said, along with a bandolier containing dozens of extra shotgun rounds. He was not wearing body armor. “We believe most if not all of the rounds shot by the suspect were from the shotgun,” Hagar said.
A state police spokesperson declined to answer follow-up questions Sunday about the shotgun itself, including whether it was a pump-action or semi-automatic model.
Posey began shooting while still in the parking lot, then moved inside the store. He fired indiscriminately upon both customers and Mad Butcher employees, Hagar said.
Law enforcement arrived on the scene in under three minutes, Hagar said, at which point Posey exited the building and exchanged fire with officers. (The law enforcement agencies that responded were the Fordyce Police Department and the Dallas County Sheriff’s Office.) Less than five minutes elapsed from the time the first shot was fired to the moment Posey was taken down, Hagar said.
In a small town like Fordyce, everyone knows each other. “The thing that makes this so personal and so difficult is that these officers and deputies that responded to the scene, these are their friends, their neighbors,” Hagar said.
As he’s reviewed statements from officers and victims, Hagar said, he’s been struck by how they don’t refer to victims generically. “They’re calling them by name. They know these people … They knew everyone personally, from the suspect to the victims on scene,” he said.
Hagar had little to say about a possible motive. Posey had little if any criminal history, he said, and police aren’t aware of any involvement Posey had with the mental health system. Contrary to rumors, Posey had not been banned from the Mad Butcher and didn’t appear to be targeting any one person or the business itself.
“I can tell you from what we’ve seen, there appears to be no personal connection [between] the shooter and any of the victims,” Hagar said. “He simply started engaging victims indiscriminately, as targets of opportunity.”
The two officers wounded in the shooting were Jacob Murry, 26, who serves in both the Fordyce Police Department and the Dallas County Sheriff’s Office, and Fordyce Police Officer James Johnson, 31. Both have been treated and released. An off-duty cop with the Stuttgart Police Department, John Hudson, was on the scene and “received minor injuries unrelated to gunfire,” state police said. (A previous press release incorrectly said Hudson had been shot.)
Of the eight shooting victims who survived, three were treated and released from the local hospital in Fordyce and five remain hospitalized. At least one, a woman, is in critical condition at UAMS; Hagar said Sunday he couldn’t give a comprehensive update on the status of the other victims but said multiple people were still being treated in hospitals in the Little Rock area.
‘I think there’s a shooting’
Robin Roark, a Methodist pastor in the town of Smackover and candidate for state representative, was at a lunch with other pastors in Hot Springs on Friday morning when he first learned about what was happening in Fordyce.
“I got a text from my mom saying she had woke up with a kidney stone, and that her doctor had called in a prescription and that she was going to pick it up,” Roark said. Her pharmacy is located directly next door to the Mad Butcher. “Two minutes later, I get a text from her saying, ‘I think there’s a shooting going on.’”
Roark texted back to ask what she meant but received no response, he said.
“I got up from the table and called her. I called her once, and no one picked up. I called her a second time, and this time the phone picked up, and all I could hear was the gunshots, thoom, thoom, thoom,”” he said. “She wasn’t answering my voice. After about 20 seconds of that, she says ‘Robin, I’m here.’”
Roark remained on the phone with his mother, guiding her away from the scene when police began exchanging fire with the shooter. She hung up, then called back when she got home.
“She let me know she made it, that she wasn’t sure what was going on, that she saw someone lying on the concrete — just all the trauma that goes with it,” he said.
Roark rushed to her house and spent the rest of the day talking to community leaders, he said. “There’s a lot of frustration,” he said. “I personally am angry. When is enough enough? … We get the standard ‘thoughts and prayers’ statements from our elected officials, from our governor and our senators and our representatives, and I think they miss the point.”
Roark, who grew up in Fordyce, said he hopes he’ll be able to take action on gun violence if elected to the Legislature. (His uncle and namesake was the late Arkansas Supreme Court Justice Robin Wynne.) While he acknowledged specific information about the Fordyce shooting was still sparse, Roark believes background checks on gun purchases and mental health-based restrictions could make a difference in Arkansas.
“Thoughts and prayers are necessary in our society. Of course I think that. I’m a Methodist pastor, I believe in prayer,” he said. “But that isn’t working anymore. We have to do something different.”
According to the advocacy group Everytown for Gun Safety, Arkansas has the weakest gun laws in the country and some of the highest rates of gun-related deaths in the nation.
Reading about other mass shootings has “always gotten me fired up, but this is more personal now,” Roark said. “Luckily, none of my family were injured, but my mom could have just as easily been walking into the Mad Butcher to get some bread. It very easily could have been her in the crossfire.”
The shooting also demonstrated the importance of rural hospitals in towns like Fordyce, Roark said.
“I’ve been thinking on how thankful I am that we have the Dallas County Medical Center right there, 500 yards away from Mad Butcher,” he said. “A rural hospital that has four emergency room beds, a doctor on call and a few nurses on call dealt with a mass shooting. Our rural hospitals are disappearing, are underfunded and understaffed, but they saved lives yesterday.”