3 KILLED BY ACTIVE SHOOTER AT INDIANA MALL BEFORE BYSTANDER SHOOTS HIM DEAD

3 KILLED BY ACTIVE SHOOTER AT INDIANA MALL BEFORE BYSTANDER SHOOTS HIM DEAD

July 20, 2022 6:26 pm

Authorities revealed new details Monday on the weekend mall shooting in Greenwood, Indiana, including the identities of the gunman, three victims and the legally armed bystander who fatally shot the gunman.

The shooting rampage took place at the Greenwood Park Mall around 6 p.m. Sunday. Multiple people called 911 to report an active shooter. Three people died and two were injured as a result of the shooting. Greenwood is 15 miles south of Indianapolis.

The gunman was identified as Jonathan Douglas Sapirman, 20, who police said prepared for the shooting for a little over an hour in a bathroom before he emerged with a rifle, Greenwood Police Chief James Ison said.

The victims were identified as Indianapolis couple Pedro Pineda, 56, and Rosa Mirian Rivera de Pineda, 37, and Victor Gomez, 30, who is also from Indianapolis.

The legally armed bystander who ended up shooting the gunman was identified as Elisjsha Dicken, 22, of Seymour, Indiana. Dicken was able to neutralize the gunman within two minutes after the gunman had already fired 24 rounds from his rifle. Dicken fired 10 shots from his Glock handgun.

“He engaged the gunman from quite a distance with a handgun — was very proficient in that, very tactically sound and as he moved to close in on the suspect he was also motioning for people to exit behind him,” Ison said. “Many more people would have died last night if not for a responsible armed citizen that took action very quickly within the first two minutes of the shooting.”

Indiana Gov. Eric Holcomb tweeted Monday that the state is grateful for the “quick, heroic actions taken by an individual citizen and first responders on Sunday evening in Greenwood, surely preventing further loss of life and injuries.”

“I stand with the community in grieving the loss of lives, and my thoughts are also with the many people impacted by this traumatic incident, including innocent bystanders whose lives are forever changed,” Holcomb tweeted.

There have been more than 350 mass shootings this year, according to Gun Violence Archive. Like CNN, the archive defines a mass shooting as one in which four or more people are shot, not including the shooter.

Greenwood now joins a slew of others also grappling with the aftermath of mass shootings, including communities reeling from recent massacres at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, and a July Fourth parade in Highland Park, Illinois.

Police are still investigating the shooter’s motive and questioning people who were inside the mall at the time. Police are asking all witnesses to contact authorities.Multiple agencies responded to the scene to assist, including the FBI, ATF, Johnson County Sheriff’s Department and Department of Homeland Security, Ison said.

“This tragedy hits at the core of our community,” Greenwood Mayor Mark Meyers said in a Facebook post Sunday. “Please offer your prayers to the victims and our first responders.”

The suspect had several minor juvenile offenses, like a fight at school and that he was a juvenile runaway, but no adult record, Ison said.

Sapirman’s family told police that he had recently resigned from a position he held at a warehouse in May, Ison said.

A SWAT team clearing Sapirman’s apartment found a laptop and a can of butane in a “high temperature” oven, Ison said Monday. The laptop was damaged.

“I don’t want to speculate what his intentions were, whether it could have been to cause a fire or to damage the laptop, but we did retrieve the laptop and that is going to go to Quantico to be analyzed,” Ison said.

Herbert Stapleton, special agent in charge of the FBI’s Indianapolis Field Office, said investigators need to consult with technical experts to see what’s possible.

The FBI will also be analyzing the suspect’s cell phone, which was found in a toilet in the bathroom near the mall’s food court, officials announced Monday.

“We’re working as fast as we can to try to get the phone to a point where it can be exploited, there’s no guarantee that we’ll be able to recover any data, we’re just working as fast as we can to try to get that done,” Stapleton said Monday.

Source: https://edition.cnn.com/2022/07/17/us/indiana-greenwood-park-mall-shooting/index.html