Illinois gunman Gary Martin brought a pistol to his termination meeting at the sprawling Henry Pratt Co. in Aurora.
When he found out he’d been fired Friday, he started killing the people in the room, authorities said.
After fatally shooting several people in the room at the manufacturing business he’d worked for 15 years, he stormed into the warehouse, witnesses said.
There, he shot at more employees.
In a rampage that lasted about 90 minutes before police killed him in a shootout, Martin killed five people and injured six people including five officers.
“During this meeting he was terminated and my understanding from the witnesses is that he opened fire right after the termination,” Aurora Police Chief Kristen Ziman said at a news conference Saturday.
“We believe that several people who were involved in that meeting are the ones who are deceased.”
Gunman had been written up before firing
While it is not known whether the gunman knew he would be fired when he brought a firearm into his workplace, a company official said he had been going through a discipline procedure and had been written up before.
Scott Hall, the CEO of Mueller Water Products, which owns the Henry Pratt Co., said the company has a progressive discipline process that can result in termination.
Four minutes after the first call to 911, police officers arrived on the scene and came under immediate fire, possibly from a window, police said.
All those who were killed or hurt by gunfire — except for the gunman — appear to have been hit in the first few minutes of the incident, Ziman said.
The shooting stopped as Martin apparently hid deeper within the warehouse. He was found about an hour and a half into the hunt in a rear machine shop, police said. He opened fire and officers fired back, killing him, authorities said.
The gunman did not legally own the pistol he used in the attack, police said.
He had been issued a firearm owner’s identification card, or FOID card, in January 2014, and in March of that year passed a background check and purchased a .40-caliber Smith & Wesson handgun from a dealer, according to Ziman.
But when he applied for a concealed-carry permit later that month, his fingerprints for another background check flagged him for a felony conviction, Ziman said.
Authorities discovered that the gunman was convicted of aggravated assault in Mississippi in 1995. Ziman said his concealed-carry permit was rejected and his FOID card was revoked. State police sent him a letter telling him to voluntarily relinquish his weapon to police, Ziman said.
How the gunman ended up keeping the gun will be part of the investigation of the incident.
“We’re looking into whether we followed up on that, and what agencies followed up on that,” she said.
