(TheRedAlertNews.com) – A bank employee in Louisville, Kentucky, who was shot in the recent mass shooting at Old National Bank, managed to survive the attack by pretending to be dead, the victim revealed.
On Monday, April 10, 25-year-old Connor Sturgeon murdered five co-workers and wounded eight others at the downtown Louisville bank branch before police killed him.
Sturgeon was a bank employee who learned he would be fired. In high school, he was a star athlete who suffered multiple concussions.
Dana Mitchell, another worker at Old National Bank, used to be Sturgeon’s mentor in the same office, but he didn’t spare her during the shooting.
Mitchell was shot in the back by her former mentee but miraculously survived without significant damage and consequences for her health.
“The bullet went in and out just below the surface. 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,” she told CBS News, as cited by the New York Post.
Mitchell detailed her shock that the co-worker she had mentored could commit such a “horrific attack.”
Sturgeon perpetrated the mass murder with a newly bought AR-15 rifle.
“I knew Connor very well. 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 had thought this would have happened,” she elaborated.
The bank employee revealed that she played dead after being shot and wounded to survive the shooting.
“I felt him shooting me immediately. I just laid down there,” Mitchell recounted.
“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,” she explained further.
She recalled the moment she suddenly saw Sturgeon brandishing his rifle.
“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,” Mitchell said.
“Everybody there but one person was in a conference room for a meeting. The only person that was there was in the hallway. 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 added.
The shooter’s former mentor said she was still trying to understand what had occurred.
“I 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,” Mitchell concluded.
Three days after the shooting, two of those injured remained hospitalized, including rookie police officer Nicholas Wilt, 26, who was shot in the head.
After brain surgery at the University of Louisville Hospital, Wilt remains in a “critical but stable condition.”
