In the months preceding her tragic shooting death at a grocery store in Arkansas, Callie Weems was embracing her new role as a mother.
Weems’ mother, 53-year-old Helen Browning, recalled her 10-month-old daughter Ivy in a phone interview on Sunday, saying that she was a continual source of wonder and fun.
Authorities say that Weems, 23, was one of the four individuals who died and the other eleven injured, including the suspected shooter, in Friday’s shooting at the Mad Butcher business in Fordyce, Arkansas. An hour prior, Weems was in awe that her young daughter had allowed her to sleep in till nine in the morning.
“I bet you feel like a new mom,” Browning remembered replying to a text.
That was their final exchange of words before Travis Eugene Posey, 44, of New Edinburg, according to the police, opened fire at the store, leaving cars covered in bullet holes while terrified onlookers hid and scurried for safety amid a flurry of gunshots.
Nurse Weems passed away on Sunday while tending to a second gunshot victim, according to Arkansas State Police Director Mike Hagar.
At a press conference, he declared, “Instead of fleeing the store, she stopped to render aid in one of the most selfless acts I’ve ever seen”
According to state police, Posey, two law enforcement officials, and twelve civilians were among the fifteen individuals who were shot on Friday.
After three years, it was at least the third mass shooting at a grocery store in the United States. At a Buffalo grocery in 2022, ten Black people were murdered by a white supremacist. That occurred a little over a year after ten people in Boulder, Colorado, were shot and killed in a grocery.
Posey seemed to have no personal relationship to any of the victims, although police stated on Sunday that they were still unsure of his motivation.
According to the authorities, he had a 12-gauge shotgun, a handgun, and a bandolier loaded with numerous extra shotgun ammunition. He opened fire on individuals in the parking area before going inside the store and firing “indiscriminately” at both customers and staff, according to Hagar. He fired the majority, if not all, of the shots with the shotgun.
Posey emerged from the business and engaged in gunfire with the Fordyce police and Dallas County sheriff’s officers, who shot him and took him into jail shortly after they arrived.
Due to Browning’s relationship to 50-year-old Roy Sturgis, another victim who was also shot and murdered, the loss was magnified for her. She added that Sturgis was a logger, a wonderful father to his daughter, and a member of her extended family.
Read Also: Mass Shooting at Arkansas’s Local Grocery Store Results in 3 Deaths, 10 Injuries
“Roy was as country as cornbread,” she stated. “He lived a simple life. He was a simple man.”
Hagar claimed that because the responding police and deputies knew both the victims and the gunman, the attack was especially challenging and intimate.
Ages of the injured range from 20 to 65, according to authorities. Five remained in the hospital, one of them a very ill woman. Posey, who was being held at the Ouachita County Detention Center, is expected to face four counts of capital murder, according to the police.
A spokesman for the state police stated on Sunday that she thought Posey had a lawyer, but she was unsure of the lawyer’s name.
Posey attended school with Browning’s younger sister, and she claimed that she never would have imagined he could commit such a horrible act.
She now intends to raise Ivy.
“She will know that her mother loved her,” she stated. “And that she was the sunshine of momma’s eyes.”
