INDIANAPOLIS — The families of five of eight people killed in last year's shooting at a FedEx facility have filed a lawsuit, saying the company and warehouse security are to blame.
"How could something like this happen in a civilized society?" asked Mary Carol Weisert.
It's a question she's still asking, nearly a year after her husband, Steven, was one of eight people shot and killed in the mass shooting on April 15, 2021.
"My son says every day, 'I just can't believe this happened, mom. How could this happen? Why us? Why this?'" Weisert said of her son's reaction to his father's death.
Weisert has no good answers for him, just a lingering grief of her own, that she only gets a break from when she goes to sleep at night and even that is rarely peaceful, with the memory of learning Steven was one of the shooting victims still haunting her.
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"I said, 'Are you sure you have the right person?'" Weisert remembers asking investigators. "And that's when they whipped out the picture of him and he was clearly deceased.
"That lives with me forever."
So does a lack of closure.
"There's no closure, because, you know, there's not going to be a trial because the person is deceased," Weisert added, talking about the 19-year-old shooter that police say took his own life after going on that deadly shooting spree.
"Why? If he wanted to go, then go, but don't take everybody else with you," said Weisert, who is one of several named in a lawsuit filed against FedEx and the private security company working there.
The suit alleges security failed to warn employees or take appropriate action when an active shooter got out of his car with a gun.
"Part of the reason I get emotional is I can't believe the brutality that someone would do something like this," said Weisert, crying, now left trying to pick up the pieces of her life that just don't seem to fit together any longer without Steven, who Weisert would have been married to 50 years this past November.
"We did everything together. It's unfathomable. A lot of times I feel like, 'How am I going to go on? How am I going to do this?'" Weisert said.
For now, though, Weisert is just trying to figure out how to get through this coming Friday on the first anniversary of Steven's death.
"I don't know how I'm going to get through the day," Weisert said.