In the aftermath of the mass shooting that took place in Louisville this week, a bank employee who was wounded in the attack has come forward to share her dramatic experience. Dana Mitchell, who was shot by her mentee, Connor Sturgeon, had to play dead in order to survive the shooting. In total, five people tragically lost their lives and nine were injured.
Mitchell, who works at the bank, mentored Sturgeon. “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,” she explained. “Not in a million years. He was very kind and soft-spoken. You would never had thought this would have happened.”
“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. 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.”
Mitchell described being shot by Connor: “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. I felt him shooting me immediately.
“I just laid down there. 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.”
🚨#BREAKING: Louisville metro police have just released bodycam footage from yesterday deadly mass shooting that killed 5 people and 8 others injured at a national bank pic.twitter.com/PWpGAnYywm
— R A W S A L E R T S (@rawsalerts) April 11, 2023
“He was not terminated, he was still an employee,” Mitchell confirmed that Connor was still in fact working at the bank. “I don’t know where the rumor came from. 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 finished.