Col. Mike Hagar (center), director of the Arkansas State Police, updates reporters on the mass shooting in Fordyce at ASP headquarters on Sunday, June 23, 2024. (Tess Vrbin/Arkansas Advocate)
Arkansas State Police has released the names of the four people killed in Friday’s shooting in Fordyce.
Friday’s shooting is classified as a mass killing, which the Associated Press defines as incidents resulting in at least four deaths. There have been 18 mass killings in the U.S. so far in 2024.
Fourteen people — 11 civilians, two law enforcement officers and the suspect — were shot at the Mad Butcher, part of a regional grocery chain, around 11:30 a.m. Friday morning. The suspect is 44-year-old Travis Posey of New Edinburg in Cleveland County.
Posey fired “dozens of rounds” of primarily buckshot from a shotgun, first in the grocery store’s parking lot before entering the building and “firing indiscriminately,” ASP Director Col. Mike Hagar said at a Sunday press conference at agency headquarters in Little Rock.
Law enforcement officers brought Posey into custody within five minutes of the first shots fired, Hagar said. He characterized the shooting as “a completely random, senseless act.”
Three dead, 11 injured in mass shooting at south Arkansas grocery
The four civilians killed were:
Shirley Taylor, 62
Callie Weems, 23
Roy Sturgis, 50
Ellen Shrum, 81
Weems was a nurse and was killed while administering aid to another victim, Hagar said.
Three of the remaining seven civilians were treated and released from the Dallas County Medical Center on Friday, while four are still hospitalized, including one woman in critical condition at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences in Little Rock, ASP announced in a Saturday press release.
Fordyce Police Officer James Johnson, 31, and Stuttgart Police Officer John Hudson, 24, survived their injuries, while Posey was treated for non-life-threatening injuries Friday and is being held in the Ouachita County Detention Center, according to ASP’s press release.
Police are investigating Posey’s motives and have not determined any connection between him and the victims, and his criminal history appears to be “very limited,” Hagar said.
Posey is charged with four counts of capital murder, with “additional charges” pending, the press release states. The death penalty is “on the table” as a potential sentence for a capital murder conviction, Hagar said.
“The actions of the suspect were the most cowardly, pathetic actions imaginable,” he said. “It seems he was literally preying on defenseless victims, the majority of which were female.”
In a post on X Friday afternoon, Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders said she was thankful for the “heroic actions” of law enforcement and other first responders and said her prayers were with the victims.
According to Everytown for Gun Safety, Arkansas has the 9th-highest rate of gun deaths in the US. In an average year, 638 people die by guns and another 1,247 people are wounded in Arkansas.
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