INDIANAPOLIS — Thursday night's shooting that left at least eight people dead, plus the suspected shooter who police say killed himself at the FedEx Ground facility near the Indianapolis airport, is the third mass shooting in the city in 2021.
While investigators search for a motive in the FedEx shooting, police said domestic disagreements led to the first two mass shootings in Indianapolis this year.
On Jan. 25, IMPD arrested 17-year-old Raymond Ronald Lee Childs III in the mass murder of his family on Jan. 24 on the northeast east side of Indianapolis.
At the time, police called the six people shot the city's "largest mass casualty shooting in more than a decade."
The shooting on Adams Street left six people dead, including a pregnant woman and her unborn child, early Sunday morning, Jan. 24, 2021.
The victims in the Adams Street shooting were identified as:
- 42-year-old Kezzie Childs
- 42-year-old Raymond Childs, Jr.
- 18-year-old Elijah Childs
- 13-year-old Rita Childs
- 19-year-old Kiara Hawkins
- Baby boy Hawkins (fetus), child of Kiara Hawkins
Childs' brother was also shot, but survived.
Six weeks later, four people died in another domestic shooting on the east side of Indianapolis.
In that incident, police arrested 25-year-old Malik Halfacre for the March 13 shootings on Randolph Street.
Investigators said Halfacre argued with his girlfriend over her stimulus payment, and that led him to shoot her, along with four others.
That night, officers first found Halfacre's girlfriend with gunshot wounds. Paramedics rushed her to the hospital in critical condition.
Then police found four people killed in a nearby house. They were later identified as 44-year-old Tomeeka Brown, 23-year-old Dequan Moore, 7-year-old Eve Moore and 35-year-old Anthony Johnson II,
Halfacre's girlfriend — the mother of his infant daughter — survived.
The Indianapolis shootings are part of a string of recent mass shootings across the country.
In Atlanta, eight people died when they were shot at massage businesses across the city.
And in Boulder, Colorado, 10 people died in a shooting March 22 at a supermarket, including Ball State graduate Eric Talley, who was serving on the Boulder police force at the time.
It was was the seventh mass killing this year in the U.S., following the Atlanta shootings, according to a database compiled by The Associated Press, USA Today and Northeastern University.
After the Boulder shootings, President Joe Biden called for "the United States Senate should immediately pass, I hope some are listening, should immediately pass the two House passed bills that close loopholes in the background check system," as he called for tougher gun control laws and to ban assault weapons and high capacity magazines.
