While authorities work to identify victims and establish the shooter’s motive, Indianapolis “Police Chief Randal Taylor noted that a ‘significant’ number of employees at the facility are members of the Sikh community, and the Sikh Coalition later confirmed that members of the community were among the wounded and killed,” AOL News reported on Friday, April 16, 2021 (read story here).
Sikhs, who originate from India, often are targets of anti-Muslim and anti-Arab hate crimes (see examples here); they are neither Muslim nor Arab. If Sikhs were targeted by the Indianapolis FedEx shooter, the incident may be similar to the 2012 mass shooting at a Sikh temple in a Milwaukee suburb (details here).
Police identified the shooter as Brandon Scott Hole (photo, left), 19, an ex-FedEx employee who was fired by the company sometime in 2020, and is being described as suicidal. He’s believed to have killed himself at the FedEx facility when police began arriving at the scene. His family warned police before the shooting that he had a “potential for violence” (see story here).
If the shooter had gone to the circle or the statehouse, or downtown library or anywhere in downtown Indianapolis and shot people randomly, the majority of his victims could be white or black. Indianapolis is pretty cosmopolitan so those blacks could be blacks from Africa, or Cuban blacks. Could be blacks who have lived in Indiana before the civil war or came up in the great migration.
There are Asians, and Hispanics and every other kind of Human in Indy from time to time on any given day, Enough diversity as the question cannot be answered as dead men tell no tales, unless they leave a note.
You’re trading in hypotheticals. The facts of the case are that he went to a facility where many of the employees are Sikhs, and 4 of the 8 people he killed were Sikhs. At this point we know he’d worked there, was fired, and had mental issues; but that doesn’t rule out a racial motive. Nor did I say there was. I don’t know. That’s why I wrote “?” and “If”.