Louisville bank employee shot by gunman speaks out for first time

‘I was his mentor his first year at the bank. He never made me feel like he would have done this. Not in a million years,’ Dana Mitchell says

One of the wounded employees in the Louisville bank shooting has spoken out, saying that she served as a mentor for gunman Connor Sturgeon and that she didn’t foresee that he may become violent.

Sturgeon shot 13 people during the massacre on Monday at Old National Bank in downtown Louisville, leaving five people dead and eight injured, one of which was bank employee Dana Mitchell.

The gunman was shot and killed by police.

Ms Mitchell told CBS News that she’s on the mend after being shot in the back.

“The bullet went in and out just below the surface,” she told the network. “It was high enough up that it ripped the skin open. It was a wound about 10 inches long. But didn’t hit anything important.”

“I knew Connor very well,” she added. “I was his mentor his first year at the bank. He never made me feel like he would have done this. Not in a million years. He was very kind and soft-spoken. You would never have thought this would have happened.”

She continued: “When I saw him in the hallway with the gun I thought, ‘why would he bring that here to show us?’ It didn’t even register to me he was ready to shoot. Everybody there but one person was in a conference room for a meeting.”

“The only person that was there was in the hallway,” she told CBS. “I saw him standing in the hallway with a gun and I saw him shoot the person in the hallway. Everyone started running. But we had nowhere to run.”

She recalled that she felt “him shooting me immediately.”

“I just laid down there,” she said. “I tried not to breathe a lot. I didn’t want to move around. I didn’t want him to see me moving or hear me breathing, because I thought he might shoot me again.”

Ms Mitchell said Sturgeon carried on shooting after leaving the conference room, adding that she heard separate gunshots following the arrival of police.

She rejected the rumour that Sturgeon had been fired from the bank.

“He was not terminated, he was still an employee,” she said. “I don’t know where the rumour came from.”

She said she “never imagined this would happen at my place of work or to me.”

“You see it on TV and it happens to other people but it doesn’t happen to people you know. But this is one of those things,” she told CBS.

Those killed in the shooting include Joshua Barrick, 40; Juliana Farmer, 45; Deana Eckert, 57; Tommy Elliott, 63; and James Tutt, 64.

Ms Eckert was among the nine people taken to hospital on Monday before she passed away. Of the eight people who were shot but are still alive, six had been able to leave the hospital as of Wednesday.

Officer Nicholas Wilt, 26, remains in critical condition after he was shot in the head.