Death Toll Rises to 8 (or possibly 9) in CT Shooting

As if there wasn’t enough hot buttons pushed with this story already, now we learn that there’s a racial component to it. The perp, Omar Thornton, was a black man, who’d previously complained to his girlfriend about racial discrimination at work.

Via Fox News:

DEVELOPING: State Police sources are telling the Hartford Courant that eight people are dead in a Tuesday morning workplace shooting at a beer distributorship in Manchester, Conn.

Earlier reports said one person was dead and two others wounded.

A union representative told WFSB-TV that seven workers were shot and that three had died.

Police sources identified the gunman as Omar S. Thornton, whose body was found inside the warehouse where the shooting took place, San Antonio said.

FOX61 in Hartford is reporting that the shooting may have been racially motivated, and that Thornton reportedly told his girlfriend that he had been discriminated against, and that a supervisor did nothing.

Brett Hollander said most of the workers were in a building across the street when police entered the warehouse where the gunman was located.

[Manchester Police Lt. Joe] San Antonio said that to his knowledge, no officers discharged their weapons. An earlier report said that police “went in there with guns blazing,” according to Hollander.

The State Firearms Bureau shows that a man named Omar Thornton purchased two firearms in January, WFSB-TV reported.

Other sources report that one of the weapons Thornton used was a .223 semi-automatic rifle. Various reports state that Thornton was being called into a disciplinary hearing and was asked to resign. This raises a lot of questions, for instance, if Thornton was escorted into a termination hearing, how did he get a semi-auto rifle in there with him? I could see someone concealing a handgun, but a rifle? And take it from someone who’s had to lay off employees for disciplinary reasons before, if they came to the meeting with anything resembling a package that could even conceivably contain a rifle or shotgun, the employee would be immediately separated from said package and the police brought in.

Curious…