Sat, Jul. 03, 2004
The Kansas City Star
Emphasis & comments in green are those of The Webmistress
Kansas City, Kan., Deputy Police Chief Samuel Breshears said all five dead victims, including the gunman, were found inside the ConAgra Foods Inc. plant at 4612 Speaker Road in the city's Argentine district.
Of the wounded victims, a 55-year-old man was in critical condition Friday night, another was released from the hospital and the other's injuries were not life-threatening, said University of Kansas Hospital spokesman Bob Hallinan.
Police said they did not know the shooter's motive. But a former ConAgra worker said the shooter recently had fought with some of the victims over the use of a pallet jack, used to lift meat. The shooter had been recently reprimanded, said Larry Ray Brooks, a nine-year ConAgra veteran who recently left.
Brooks said the shooter had been laid off and called back in recent weeks, before arguing with some of his victims.
Other plant employees who were witnesses to the shooting said they recognized the gunman as a man who felt teased and picked on.
“We do believe the individual responsible was a disgruntled employee,” Breshears said. Police further said that he had “multiple weapons.”
Family members identified one dead victim as Lonnie Ellingburg, 45, who was shot five times. Ellingburg was described by family members as an avid fisherman who had recently bought a boat.
Police were not releasing the identities of the other dead victims, ages 45 and 21, until today. They hadn't positively identified two of them late Friday night. The other injured victims were 60 and 44 years old.
All the shooting victims were male, and two of the five dead victims — and a third wounded victim — were related and part of the same extended family, according to family members.
ConAgra, with headquarters in Omaha, Neb., issued a statement Friday evening. “Our heartfelt sympathies go out to the families of those involved in this tragedy today. The investigation is ongoing and we are working with the local police,” the statement said. A company spokesman declined to comment further.
The shootings were reported about 5:19 p.m. at the food-packaging and processing plant. Right before that, one plant worker, Andre Porter, was in the locker room when a fellow worker walked in. He asked Porter how he was doing, walked out of the room, re-entered moments later, walked past Porter — and then Porter heard “popping” noises. Then this fellow worker came running past Porter.
“He just looked at me. That's when I saw the gun,” Porter said. The gunman kept going.
Elsewhere, plant worker Daniel Jenkins was on his way up to the second-floor lunch room when he heard what sounded like a mix of fireworks and gunshots. He opened the door to the lunch room, smelled gunpowder and saw smoke that seemed like a morning fog. Jenkins said he saw a man holding a gun standing next to the candy machine, wide-eyed and shouting obscenities.
Plant employee Juan Ramirez, who was wounded in the attack, told family members that he was shot in the cafeteria, two of Ramirez's nephews said. Ramirez was shot in the thigh and “doing OK,” one of them said.
Both Jenkins and Porter said the gunman had felt picked on at work. “He just thought everybody was picking on him,” said Porter, who knew the gunman.
Jenkins said he knew the gunman, too, and described him as someone who became upset when other workers took his equipment or when management lectured him. Jenkins said he would kid the gunman about eating chicken burritos every day, and a week ago the man's demeanor changed. Jenkins said the man told him, “Danny, don't mess with me. You don't know me.”
“He just got all serious about it,” Jenkins said. “Once he did, I didn't want to say anything to him anymore.”
After the shootings, dozens of law-enforcement personnel and emergency medical workers raced to the plant. Police evacuated the building and cordoned off a wide area outside the plant within minutes. The scene at the plant was chaotic, as police took statements from plant workers and relatives of those workers tried to contact them to see whether they were safe.
On the south side of the plant, anxious family members gathered across from a trucking plant, many with young children, all sharing worried looks. Many of those who arrived stood with cell phones pressed to their ears, updating other family and friends about efforts to locate loved ones who had been inside the plant. Police eventually opened the nearby Argentine Community Center for the family members.
Some family members complained that they were not getting enough information about whether their relatives were shot. The 160 workers at the plant at the time of the shooting were separated from friends and relatives because police hoped to gather eyewitness statements and investigate the crime scene in a “methodical process,” in the words of Kansas City, Kan., Police Chief Ron Miller.
“The worst thing would be to guess and give the wrong information,” Miller said.
Not until about 9 p.m. were plant employees allowed to leave. Still, some family members were able to communicate with plant workers during the preceding hours.
Juanita Chrisman called her husband, Steve Chrisman, who drives a forklift at the plant, at 5 p.m. They had planned for her to pick him up at 5:30. When she called at 5:25, “all that I heard was chaos and screaming over the cell phone,” she said.
Her husband told her that someone had been shooting in the building, “and I could tell by his voice that he was very upset,” said Juanita Chrisman, who works as a nurse at a doctor's office. She later spoke with her husband, and he told her that four persons had been shot dead in the plant's cafeteria, and that three others were wounded.
Wiping away tears, she said she just wanted to see her husband.
ConAgra's plant in Kansas City, Kan., is one of 24 in the company's refrigerated-foods group, said company spokeswoman Julie DeYoung. The plant had until recently operated under the Armour Swift-Eckrich name, she said. Workers there prepare and package processed meats such as lunch meat and breaded chicken patties under the Armour and Eckrich brand names. Finished foods, both refrigerated and frozen, are then shipped to distribution centers.
ConAgra Foods is one of the nation's largest agribusinesses, with $19.8 billion in sales last year. Its consumer brands include Banquet, Blue Bonnet, Chef Boy-ar-dee, La Choy and Peter Pan.
An hour after the shootings, police were going back into the building to shut off equipment that had been left powered on. Their biggest concern was the potential for injury if the equipment running inside were to produce a leak in the ammonia-based cooling system.
Joseph Robinson's brother, Vincent Love, is a machine operator at the plant. Robinson said Love had told him in the past about seeing pistols at work on occasion. Robinson said Love told him “one day this is going to happen, and it's going to be an employee.”
At the entrance of the driveway into the ConAgra plant off Speaker Road, a sign showed a red circle with a slash through a handgun. It read: “No Firearms Allowed on This Property.”(Whew, good thing that sign was up! The Company will keep you safe!)
The Star's Benita Williams, Kit Wagar, Mark Davis, Tony Rizzo, Brad Cooper, Eric Palmer, Nick Kowalczyk and Lee Hill Kavanaugh contributed to this report.
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