Louisville Shooting Victim Was From Harrodsburg
Five Dead, Nine Injured In Bank Massacre
Deana Eckert. Image: Linked In.
Robert Moore
Herald Staff
rmoore@harrodsburgherald.com
One of the victims of Monday’s shooting in Louisville was a native of Harrodsburg. Authorities announced that Deana Hurst Eckert, 57, an executive administrative officer at Old National Bank, died Monday night.
Eckert lived in New Albany, Indiana, with her family but was originally from Harrodsburg, according to her Facebook page. Eckert still has family here in Harrodsburg. Her father is Ben Condit Hurst and her mother was Judy Hurst, who passed away in 2021, according to the Ransdell Funeral Chapel’s website.
Eckert is one of five people to have died so far after a shooting at Old National Bank in Louisville on Monday, April 10. According to media reports, the gunman, Connor Sturgeon, a 25-year-old bank employee, livestreamed the shooting.
Nine people were injured, including Nickolas Wilt, a 26-year-old rookie police officer with the Louisville Metro Police Department, who graduated from the police academy just 10 days before the shooting, according to CNN. Wilt was listed as critical but stable after undergoing brain surgery at University Hospital. Another officer was hospitalized after being hit in the elbow, according to CNN.
The shooting began around 8:30 a.m., when staff were gathered for a morning meeting. Sturgeon opened fire with an AR-15 style rifle, according to CNN, with some employees sheltering in the bank’s vault. Sturgeon was killed in a shoot out with police, according to CNN.
During the press conference following the shooting, authorities announced there had been another shooting at Jefferson Community and Technical College in downtown Louisville, about 1.5 miles away from Old National Bank, according to the Louisville Courier-Journal. One person was killed and another was injured in that shooting, which was unrelated to the events at Old National Bank, authorities said.
The shooting at the bank was the 146th mass shooting so far this year, according to the Gun Violence Archive, 20 more than the same date last year. Between 2016 and 2022, the number of mass shootings—defined as a shooting with four or more victims not including the gunman—nearly doubled, from 383 in 2016 to 647 in 2022, according to figures on the Gun Violence Archive’s website.
Among those killed Monday was bank senior vice president Tommy Elliott, 65, a close personal friend of Gov. Andy Beshear and Louisville Mayor Craig Greenberg. In a press conference, the governor called Elliott, Eckert and the other victims “amazing people” whose communities will mourn and miss them.
The other people killed in the shooting include Joshua Barrick, 40; Juliana Farmer, 45; and James Tutt, 64, according to the Louisville Metro Police Department.
Eckert, a graduate of Western Kentucky University, had worked for decades in the banking industry. She had worked for nearly seven years at Old National Bank, according to her Linked In profile. She and her husband Michael married in 1994.
No funeral details had been made available by press time.
