On the day after Easter 2023, Dana Mitchell went to work, grabbed a coffee and walked to the conference room for the regular Monday morning meeting. She was talking to a co-worker about his tan from a vacation.
She looked up and saw another co-worker, Connor Sturgeon, in the doorway. He was holding a gun.
Chaos erupted as he began to shoot at Mitchell and their colleagues at Old National Bank in Louisville. Within minutes Sturgeon had killed five bank employees and wounded another eight co-workers, including Mitchell, before he was killed by Louisville police responding to the scene.
In the United States, it was hardly a unique event.
Hundreds of people are murdered on the job every year in the United States. According to a report released Thursday by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there were 458 people murdered at their workplace in 2023. That’s an average of nearly nine a week. The total was down from the 524 who were murdered on the job in 2022. Between 2018 and 2023 there have been 2,762 workplace homicides in the United States.
The threat of being murdered at work is, of course, not the only risk workers face. The report shows a total of 5,283 died on the job in 2023, with transportation accidents the most common form of death with 1,942 dying that way last year, followed by deaths following falls, trips or slips, which killed 885 workers. But those were unintentional deaths.
The issue of on-the-job homicides has gotten more attention in recent weeks following the fatal shooting of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson as he prepared to walk into a New York City hotel for an investor meeting. Thompson’s death, and the search for and capture of his alleged assailant, has been a top story.
But many workplace murders go relatively unnoticed. Mass shootings like the one at Old National Bank have become commonplace, and might get a few days of national coverage, sometimes because yet another mass shooting has taken its place. Many other incidents in which only a single individual is killed might garner only local news coverage, if that.
And most people showing up to work are as oblivious to the numbers, as were Mitchell and her co-workers when they went to a meeting that morning to chat about how their Easter weekend had been, or the vacation one of them had just returned from.
‘This surely will never happen here’
Mitchell had worked in banks for nearly 40 years, since she was 19 years old. She never considered safety an issue at her job. Her company required her to watch a training video about active shooters, but it barely registered. The only reason she was watching it was because she had to, she thought. It couldn’t happen at Old National.
Even as Sturgeon stood there with the assault-style rifle, it didn’t make sense in her mind.
“I really thought he had bought a gun over weekend and brought it in to show us. I never assumed he was going to use it,” she said.
“People were running out of the conference room. One made it, others did not,” she recalled. “I dove on the floor and tried to crawl as far as I could. I was shot in the back while I was on the floor.”
Sturgeon emptied his first clip right there, in the conference room. Then the shooting stopped for a moment. The co-workers sitting on either side of Mitchell at the conference table were dead. Fortunately, Mitchell’s own bullet wound was relatively shallow. She lay on the ground, trying not to breathe, in case he was looking for signs of life in his victims.
“I didn’t know where he was, if he was still standing there,” she said. “I remember laying on the floor, thinking, ‘Is this really happening? Is this is how I’m going to die?’”
How frequently workers are murdered
But as horrifying as the incident was for the victims who survived and the family members of those killed, murders take place somewhere in an American workplace an average of about three times a week, or more.
Those killed range across all types of professions, including school employees who were victims in shootings at schools, and police officers on the job. But many of the murders take place in professions which might appear safe, such as retail. Of the 306 retail employees who died on the job, 94 were murdered. That’s one more than the 93 murdered working in “protective services,” which includes police and security guards.
There were 84 workers in hospitality and food services who died through “violent act,” although that total includes any workers who committed suicide while on the job.
Yet only about one-quarter of adults said they were stressed by the possibility of a mass shooting occurring at work or at an office, according to a 2019 survey conducted for the American Psychological Association. About twice as many were nervous about a shooting possibly occurring at public events such as a parade or sporting event, a mall or a school or university.
But a study by the Violence Prevention Project, a nonprofit, nonpartisan research center funded by the National Institute of Justice, found the current or former workplaces of perpetrators were the most common sites for a mass shootings to occur. And 30% of the project’s database of 200 mass shootings since 1966 are classified as “workplace shooters.”
“Workplace homicides often stem from personal grievances that spill over into professional settings,” said Dr. James Dempsey, deputy director of the Violence Prevention Project and chair of the department of criminology and criminal justice at Metro State University. “For some perpetrators, workplaces represent symbols of authority or rejection, especially in cases of job loss or disciplinary action. At the same time, humans are creatures of habit, and perpetrators often target what they know. Familiarity breeds opportunity. When someone is angry or desperate, they act within environments they understand best.”
Yet many workers didn’t have even the rudimentary training that Mitchell and other bank employees had gone through on their laptops about what to do in case of an active shooter.
Less training than a third grader
“The average third grader gets more training in what to do (with an active shooter) than most workers,” said Jessica Martinez, executive director of the National Council on Occupational Safety and Health, a public interest group. Many states mandate that students undergo lockdown drills multiple times a year.
Martinez said that since Thompson’s murder “there’s heightened security for CEOs, but all workers deserve to come home at the end of the day, not just the CEOs.”
Mitchell said she is a supporter of the right to bear arms and owns a gun herself. But she said she would like to see limits placed on public ownership of assault-style rifles, such as the one Sturgeon used that morning.
“For lack of a better word, those weapons are overkill,” she said. And she also would like better checks in place to make sure people with mental health issues are not able to buy weapons. Since the shooting she has become active in working to see Kentucky pass the Crisis Aversion and Rights Retention bill, which would allows for the temporary transfer of firearms away from people if a court finds the gun owner poses a danger of causing injury to themself or others.
Three months after the shooting, Mitchell returned to work, but she left the job earlier this year to care for a family member. It was hard to be at the bank, she said. She suffered survivor’s guilt.
“Even now, the hardest thing I’ve dealt with is the loss of those five people. Two of them I was very, very close to,” she said. “To this day, when I think about the fact I’m still here and they’re not, it makes me extremely sad, extremely angry. I don’t know why I survived and the people on either side of me are gone.”
