A week ago today, a shooter opened gunfire in the parking lot of the Mad Butcher grocery store in Fordyce. The story changed rapidly, from the number shot to the number killed, first two, then three and eventually four succumbing to their wounds.
The person arrested is a nearby resident who drives a truck for a living. He was injured but not seriously, and was quickly taken into custody. As for motive, nothing has come to light.
Certainly, considering the people killed did little to help anyone understand what was going on in the shooter’s mind. One victim was a nurse in her 20s, and one was a woman in her 80s. The nurse was giving aid to one of the victims and was herself shot. And a man in his 50s who had left the scene but went back to offer aid to the nurse was killed. The idea of getting back at a mean world by killing an octogenarian is beyond comprehension.
The scene has become sadly commonplace across the country, with some deranged someone grabbing an easily accessible weapon to go on a shooting spree. Society is then left to pick up the ugly pieces. Fordyce is doing that now.
Independent reporting for Pine Bluff & Jefferson County since 1879.
The scar on the town, however, will be visible for years and the pain is perhaps made all the worse because it is a sleepy town where literally everyone knows everyone. As a state police official noted, when people in Fordyce talked about what happened, they didn’t refer to the people involved as this or that man or woman but by their names.
That sort of familiarity hit close to home for our newspaper in that our correspondent, Richard Ledbetter, who covered the story for us was particularly troubled by what happened because he knows the victims and their relatives and knows the person arrested, as well, and his family.
In all the misery of this, a couple of brighter points came to light. One was how fast the authorities moved to quell the violence. The call came into the 911 office at 11:38 a.m., and six minutes later, the scene was in hand, meaning the shooter was under control. That is an amazingly fast response, and as fast as the shooter was firing, there’s no telling how many people were saved from injury or death because of the quick action.
The other element that put something of a balm on the situation was how the community has come together. On Sunday, hundreds showed up to honor and mourn those lost and to pray for all the people and families involved. As one pastor urged, prayers should be offered for all of the people who are hurting, even the suspected shooter and his family. That’s a big ask, of course, but not too big for a town like Fordyce, where no one is a stranger.