Families shopping at the Arkansas supermarket where three people were killed and 10 others injured during a mass shooting on Friday reportedly hid in the freezer as they desperately tried to stay out of sight of the attacker, according to reports.
The chilling details emerged as authorities identified the alleged shooter and media reports mentioned one of the people killed at the Mad Butcher store in Fordyce.
That person was 23-year-old Callie Weems, a nurse who worked at the Dallas County, Arkansas, Medical Center, according to what her mother, Helen Browning, told local news station KLRT.
Weems was reportedly shopping on her day off when she was shot dead, and her survivors include a 10-month-old daughter.
Browning told KLRT she had a sense of foreboding when she was unable to contact Weems after news of the shooting spread. She said she hoped Weems had just traveled to the hospital to help her colleagues respond to the mass shooting.
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“My best friend was standing there and I said… ‘Tell me my baby is okay,’ and she said, ‘I can’t,'” Helen Browning told KLRT. ‘And then I just broke.
“I just want my baby back.”
Weems’ family reported that another family member, the father of a niece, also died in the shooting.
Meanwhile, CNN interviewed Katrina Doherty, 39, about how she hid in the supermarket freezer with her 18-year-old daughter and four-year-old son after the shooting broke out. She said she couldn’t find an escape route after hearing 10 gunshots.
She said she didn’t have a cell phone to call police, and others in the freezer were praying and crying as they tried to listen to what was happening in the store.
“We just sat there and prayed. I was panicking,” Doherty told CNN. “My son almost froze to death. We tried to get him to be quiet, but he said he wanted his dad.
“It felt like we were there forever. We were there for maybe 15 minutes. I asked the Lord to protect everyone. I was just praying. The other lady was praying. She was crying.”
The workers at one point saw a dead person outside the freezer door. The group in the freezer stayed there until one of the store employees outside heard the police, and then they were all escorted out of the Mad Butcher.
According to the store’s meat manager, Matthew Gill, a man entered the supermarket with a shotgun before exchanging gunfire with police who arrived on the scene to confront him.
Officers from the Dallas Sheriff’s Office and Arkansas State Police arrived at the store around 11:30 a.m. Friday. In addition to the three deaths, two law enforcement officers and eight civilians were injured in the ensuing gunfire.
Authorities identified the suspected attacker as 44-year-old Travis Eugene Posey. Posey – from New Edinburg, Arkansas – suffered an abrasion to his head as a result of the shootout with police, according to investigators.
Officers booked him into jail on three counts of capital murder, with more charges pending.
Helen Browning reportedly knew Posey since he was a child, local news station KTHV reported.
“I just want to know why Joey Posey woke up this morning and decided he had to go and ruin the lives of families,” Browning told KLRT.
There have been at least 234 mass shootings in the U.S. so far this year on Saturday morning — an average of more than one per day, according to the Gun Violence Archive.
The online resource defines a mass shooting as an incident in which four or more shooting victims are injured or killed.
Such a high daily rate of mass shootings in the US has prompted some public calls for more substantive gun control. But for the most part, the federal government has been unwilling or unable to respond to these calls.
Fordyce is a town of approximately 3,200 residents. It is located about 65 miles south of Little Rock, the capital of the state of Arkansas.
