The 911 calls came in a flurry starting at 1:24 p.m. Friday. An employee who had just been fired was shooting up Aurora’s Henry Pratt Co., the callers said.
Police officers arrived four minutes later and almost immediately encountered gunman Gary Martin, a 45-year-old with a history of violence and a .40-caliber Smith & Wesson pistol he wasn’t legally entitled to carry.
Martin had already killed several of his co-workers. Within minutes, he had wounded numerous police officers and vanished into the cavernous warehouse.
Thus began America’s latest mass shooting, one whose terrible toll can be traced in a staggering array of figures:
Five employees shot to death. Five police officers wounded. A response that drew up to 300 officers, including eight SWAT teams. A manhunt that lasted 66 minutes. A final confrontation that was over in seconds.
But while the mass shooting ended with Martin’s death, the suffering will endure among families, friends and neighbors of the dead. So, too, will questions about how Martin was able to buy and keep his weapon when his criminal background should have prohibited it.
Meanwhile, the residents of Illinois’ second-largest city, which has seen a sharp decline in murders over the last 15 years, are left to mourn an outbreak of heartbreaking, bewildering violence.
“You never think it’s going to happen here, and I never would have thought that in a million years,” said Colleen Hardekopf of The Flower Basket, a shop near Pratt that has offered free floral arrangements for the funeral services. “This is a wake-up call for all of us.”
It’s not clear whether Martin, a 15-year Pratt veteran who worked as a large valve assembler, knew that Friday would be the day he was fired. But Scott Hall, an executive at parent company Mueller Water Products, said termination is the last step of a multistage disciplinary process.
“To be at the final step, he would have gone through the previous steps,” Hall told reporters Saturday.
Whatever he might have known, Martin came to work with a pistol equipped with a laser scope — a weapon police said he was carrying illegally.
He bought the gun in 2014 after obtaining an Illinois firearm owner’s identification card. But Aurora police Chief Kristen Ziman said the background check he underwent evidently did not reveal that he had been convicted of aggravated assault in Mississippi about 25 years earlier — a felony that disqualified him from legally owning a gun.
His record soon came to light when he applied for a concealed carry license. He was denied, and should have been instructed to turn in his gun to local authorities, Ziman said. It’s unclear if that ever happened.
A witness said Martin had been called into a meeting to be fired, and as soon as that happened, he started shooting. Three people were killed at the meeting, and two others were killed elsewhere in the plant, police said.
The victims included:
Josh Pinkard, 37, of Oswego, the company’s plant manager.
Vicente Juárez, 54, of Oswego, a stockroom attendant and forklift operator.
Russell Beyer, 47, of Yorkville, a mold operator and the plant’s union chairman.
Clayton Parks, 32, of Elgin, the human resources manager.
Trevor Wehner, 21, of Sheridan, Ill., a human resources intern and Northern Illinois University senior who was spending his first day at the company.
Police said all five were discovered dead within minutes of the first officers’ arrival. After trading fire with police as they tried to enter the building, Martin fled deep within the 29,000-square-foot plant.
The gunfire drew a massive show of force. Deputy Chief Keefe Jackson said up to 35 agencies sent 200 to 300 officers to the scene, and they divided themselves into “contact teams” charged with hunting for Martin, and “rescue task force teams” designated to find and care for victims.
The officers’ entry into the building was aided by a “BearCat,” an armored police vehicle that smashed its way through an industrial door, Lt. Rick Robertson said. Once they were in, he said, a long, eerie search began.
“It’s a massive facility with numerous racks of large valves and machines throughout the building,” he said. “(Martin) broke contact and went to the back … a back machine shop at the very back part of the building, farthest from the area where we made entry into the building. He was probably waiting for us to get to him there, is the way that it appeared.”
Police said they had no contact with Martin from 1:52 p.m. to 2:58 p.m., when they finally came upon him in the machine shop. Robertson said no words were exchanged before Martin started shooting.
“It was a very short gunfight and it was over,” he said. “He was basically in the back waiting for us. He fired upon us and officers fired back.”
Martin was declared “neutralized” at 2:59, police said. The Kane County coroner determined he had died of multiple gunshot wounds.
As the investigation into the shooting continues, Ziman said, Aurora police were somber but relieved.
“On one hand, we have some relief that all of our officers will be OK, but I know those officers will be going through some not only physical pain but emotional pain, too,” she said. “And I know that with the lives lost, the officers are wishing they could have done more.
“I think that that’s pretty natural. … But we have to pause and look at what they did do.”
Megan Jones and Sarah Freishtat are reporters for the Beacon-News. Steve Lord of the Beacon-News contributed.
mejones@chicagotribune.com
sfreishtat@tribpub.com
jkeilman@chicagotribune.com
