Thomas and Sharon Brazile were sitting in their car late Friday morning outside the only grocery store in Fordyce, Arkansas, discussing what to buy to put on the grill that night when they noticed a man with a gun approaching them.
“He saw them and he shot them,” Brazil said. The 65-year-old pastor was shot in the forehead above his right eye. Mr. Brazil suffered cuts from broken glass. Both men were taken to hospital but survived. They were the lucky ones.
Police said the gunman opened fire at the Mad Butcher grocery store, killing four people and wounding nine others. On Saturday, the town of 3,400 people about 70 miles south of Little Rock was just beginning to recover from the bloodshed as some details began to emerge.
“I'm speechless,” said Casey Langley, whose daughter runs a florist a few doors down from the Mad Butcher. “I woke up this morning and thought it was all a dream. This didn't actually happen, but it did.”
Arkansas State Police identified the dead late Saturday as Shirley Taylor, 62, Carrie Weems, 23, Roy Sturgis, 50, and Ellen Schramm, 81.
Taylor's daughter, Angela Atchley, said her mother was doing her usual grocery shopping when she was killed while standing at the cash register at the Mad Butcher.
Taylor, who liked to cook and host small parties, asked Atchley's son if he would accompany her shopping on Friday. He declined, and now Atchley says he “regrets it.” “He said, 'I wish I'd protected her,' and I said, 'Well, then there'd be two funerals.'”
Among those injured were two troopers with non-life-threatening injuries and the suspect, Travis Eugene Posey, 44, of New Edinburg, about 10 miles southeast of Fordyce, according to Arkansas State Police. Four people remain hospitalized, including one in critical condition at a Little Rock hospital, police said late Saturday.
Police said Posey will be charged with four counts of murder, with additional charges pending. In Ouachita Parish, which borders Dallas County where the shootings occurred, Posey was being held on suspicion of murder and attempted murder, according to an inmate roster.
Authorities have not released details about a motive for the shootings, which appear to have occurred both inside the store and in the parking lot. A police official said the suspect used a shotgun. It was unclear Saturday whether any other weapons were used or if the weapons were obtained illegally. It was also unclear if the suspect had any ties to the victims.
But “he was calm,” Brazile said. “He was walking and firing.”
Posey, known as Joey, comes from a family that has lived in the area for generations. He worked in the timber industry, as did his father, Travis Julian Posey, who served as a Marine in the Vietnam War and died in 2021. The suspect also worked in the trucking industry, and a truck from his company, Travis Posey Trucking, was parked on his property Saturday.
At the Mad Butcher, two red pieces of paper were taped to the door with the message “TEMPORARY CLOSED. PLEASE PRAY FOR COMMUNITY” written in all capital letters.
“It's unheard of in this little town,” Langley said, stopping to take a photo of a wreath his daughter had donated near the store.
Other residents were similarly shaken Saturday, with some expressing relief that their loved ones had been spared.
Robin Roark, a pastor who is also running for the Arkansas House of Representatives, said he received a text message from his mother on Friday as she was parked in front of a pharmacy in the same shopping center as a grocery store, telling him she thought a shooting was happening.
“I called my mom and the phone just kept ringing and nobody picked up,” Roark said Saturday morning. “I called three or four times before she picked up. All I could hear was gunfire. Just a constant barrage of gunfire. I was like, 'Mom, are you there?'”
Eventually, Roark's mother got into the car. She was found lying on the floor of the car but was uninjured.
Brazile said he knows he and his wife were lucky.
Doctors told him he had shrapnel in his wound but would be OK. “I was just glad. I could have lost an eye,” he said, adding that he was grateful “for the chance to play with my grandchildren again.”
One of the victims, Taylor, had three children, six grandchildren and two great-grandchildren, Atchley said. “She was just an incredible woman,” she added. “She would do anything for her children. Family was everything to her.”
Atchley recalled the last time he saw his mother: It was a Thursday, and Atchley, who lives in Camden, about 30 miles south of Fordyce, was on his way to Little Rock to stop by his mother's house and give her some cucumbers and tomatoes from her garden.
“I told her I loved her,” she said.
