Before sunrise today, workers at the sprawling FedEx facility in Kennesaw heard loud bangs, imitating the familiar sound of boxes hitting conveyor belts.
Then, workers saw an armed man who, a terrified co-worker recalled, looked like Rambo. Minutes later, six workers were wounded or injured – two in critical condition with life-threatening injuries. The 19-year-old gunman then killed himself with his shotgun, police said.
Employee Liza Aiken saw the shooter, a fellow employee she said was a loader, just before she heard gunfire. Aiken was making address corrections to some packages when she said she heard a “clink.”
She turned. “I saw him standing there and the knife was on the ground. He dropped his knife. He had an assault rifle. He had bullets strapped to his chest like Rambo. I mean he looked like he was heading into war. As soon as I saw him, I ran the other way. I ran and made sure that people upstairs were gone.
“He was in all black. I think he had a camo vest. He had an assault rifle and bullets strapped to his chest.”
Aiken said she previously reported the suspect to her superiors. She said he pointed a work laser in her eye.
Police rushed to the scene after getting the initial call at 5:54 a.m. The suspect shot the guard in security booth in the stomach and entered the facility, witnesses said.
The victims were taken to WellStar Kennestone Hospital, three in critical condition, two of whom are in surgery, a 28-year-old male and 52-year-old female, said Kennestone Hospital emergency room doctor Michael Nitzken.
"There's quite a bit of work left for them," Nitzken said. The doctor said hospital officials were alerted at 6:26 a.m. of the shootings, leading to “organized chaos” at the trauma center. He said the call came in during a shift change, which was fortunate, “because we had double the staff.”
The suspect is dead, Cobb County police Sgt. Dana Pierce told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
The gunman’s body was located in the bay area of FedEx and police swept the ground floor of the facility with dog teams.
Word spread quickly to other employees. Michael Hogland, a ground driver at the FedEx facility at McCollum Field, said, his boss called about 6 a.m. telling him “there was a guy inside. Shot a security guard. He had a gun pointed at (my boss) and said, ‘Don’t worry about getting here on time.’ “
Another employee, Randy Kitfield, said he heard what sounded like heavy boxes hitting the belts. He initially ignored it “because you hear it all the time.” But he said the scene got “real ominous, real quiet.”
He looked down hallway and saw somebody run with a gun on the other side of the terminal. “I thought, maybe it’s the cops; I thought maybe a bomb scare or something.”
Police escorted a bus filled with FedEx employees from the shipping plant to Sparkles skating rink, where they were taken after being questioned to meet with families and loved ones and to arrange rides home.
Records from the Cobb Tax Assessor’s say the owner of the property at 1675 Airport Road is the Cobb County Development Authority. The building is a total of 269,616 square feet. There’s a main building with warehouse space, along with a small amount of office space.
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