Five people were killed and eight were hurt in a shooting at the Old National Bank in downtown Louisville, Kentucky. The suspect was a high school basketball star who wore a hat because he had been hit in the head before.
Monday, cops shot and killed Connor Sturgeon, a 25-year-old bank worker who was live-streaming his killing spree on Instagram.
Sturgeon was a student at Floyd Central High School in Floyds Knobs, Indiana. He played basketball, football, and track and field.
Sturgeon’s former student told The Daily Beast that he was called “Mr. Floyd Central” because his father was the head coach of the team.
A classmate who asked to remain anonymous did say that Sturgeon wore a helmet when he played basketball because he had been hurt in the head while playing football.
We were on the same football team in eighth grade. He had a lot of headaches, which kept him out of school for most of the year, he said. “He had a couple more while he was still in high school.”
When Sturgeon was a junior on the Floyd Central High School basketball team, he wore a helmet during a game in which he scored about half of the team’s points.
A former friend of Sturgeon’s said he couldn’t stop thinking about how Sturgeon’s injuries in high school were similar to other times when players with concussions went on to hurt themselves or others.
Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE) is a brain disease that gets worse over time and is caused by repeated blows to the head. In recent years, scientists have found many links between football players and CTE.
The Concussion Legacy Foundation says that people with CTE tend to have trouble thinking and remembering, as well as a tendency toward violence, mood swings, sadness, and anxiety.
After he graduated from high school, Sturgeon went to the University of Alabama to get a master’s degree in business. He will finish school in 2020.
His LinkedIn page says that while he was in college, Sturgeon worked as an intern at Old National Bank for three years in a row. He was hired in 2018 as a full-time associate and portfolio banker and in 2021 as a commercial growth expert.
Even though the Instagram account where the footage was shared has since been deleted, local media have used screengrabs to show that Sturgeon looked shaky in the hours before the shooting.
Some of his supposedly last posts were memes with lines like “I know what I have to do, but I don’t know if I have the strength to do it” and “I could burn this whole place down.” At press time, The Post could not confirm whether or not these posts were real.
“Words and protests don’t matter to them,” his last message supposedly said. I wonder if they will notice this.
All four people who died were top bank workers at the Louisville branch, and police are still looking into what might have happened.
CNN said that when Sturgeon found out he was going to be fired, he told his parents and a friend about his plans to rob a bank.
Senior vice presidents Tommy Elliott, age 63, and Joshua Barrick, age 40, as well as market executive Jim Tutt, age 64, business loan expert Juliana Farmer, age 45, and executive administrative officer Deanna Eckert, all died. (age 57).