Among the gunman’s victims was Betts’ sister, Megan K. Betts, 22, police said. Authorities did not say whether Connor Betts had sought to kill his sister or was aware that she was in the area Saturday night. They were still working to determine a motive, they said.
The victims were a variety of ages and races and included both males and females.
Police identified them as: Lois L. Oglesby, 27, a black female; Saeed Saleh, 38, a black male; Derrick R. Fudge, 57, a black male; Logan Turner, 30, a white male; Nicholas P. Cumer, 25, a white male; Thomas J. McNichols, 25, a black male; Beatrice N. Warren-Curtis, 36, a black female; and Monica E. Brickhouse, 39, a black female.
Of the nine victims, six were African Americans and three were white. Authorities said it was unlikely that the gunman, who was white, shot people based on their race.
“It’s hard to imagine that there was much discrimination in the shooting,” Lt. Col. Matt Carper said. “It happened in a very short period of time.”
McNichols was “a great father, a great brother. He was a protector,” said Jevin Lamar, his cousin, in a phone interview. Everyone called him Teejay, he said, and he played kickball at family gatherings.
Lamar also knew a second victim, Oglesby, who he said had at least two children, including a new baby. “Now she is gone and they are never going to see their mother again,” he said.
Lamar said the Oregon district, where the shooting took place, was considered the safest place to party.
“If you go anywhere else in Dayton, you could be shot by gang members or robbed,” he said. “But that strip is safe because it’s nearby colleges. It’s the nice part of downtown Dayton.”
— ‘There wasn’t any saving,’ said a witness who tried to help
James Williams, 50, who owns a pizzeria called Double Deuce, had been seated with friends on the patio at Ned Peppers as a line to get into the bar snaked along the sidewalk. Then they moved to a bar across the street called Newcom’s Tavern. Suddenly, they heard shots.
“We heard the bang-bang-bang-bang,” Williams recalled in a telephone interview Sunday. “Everybody started rushing to the back of the bar. Then the shots stopped, and people were screaming ‘Help!’”
Williams and his friend Holly Redman rushed back to Ned Peppers, and found bodies lying all over the ground outside. Police at the scene were asking for belts to use as tourniquets, Williams said, so he offered his.
Redman, 31, a paraprofessional who works with disabled children and is certified in CPR, began helping an effort to save a man who had been shot in the groin.
They did chest compressions. Redman said she began breathing into his mouth, felt for a pulse, and stripped off her shirt to use to try to stem his bleeding.
“He was gurgling,” she said Sunday. “I looked him in the eye. I tried to talk to him. I said, ‘Hang on, buddy.’” But he didn’t survive.
She said another man next to her screamed the name Patricia.
“They were like ‘She’s gone,’” Redman said. “And he was like, ‘No. Please, God. Tell me it’s not true.’”
There were bodies “everywhere you looked,” she said. “It was like World War II. I just started crying and looking at all these people. That could have been us. Three or four minutes, and that could have been us.”
Williams said he was told that the bouncer at Ned Peppers had prevented the gunman from entering the bar, which opened onto a crowded dance floor. In a Facebook message, Ned Peppers said the bouncer “was sent to the hospital for shrapnel-related” injuries but was expected to recover.
Williams, who also has a civilian job at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base outside the city, said he had watched the news of the El Paso, Texas, mass shooting earlier on Saturday. At the time, he said, he thought it was “just another mass shooting that we hear about all the time, and you never think it’s going to hit home.”
He said he counted at least seven bodies, including one in the doorway of Ned Peppers, which had been handcuffed. That was the gunman, he said the police told him. A backpack lay nearby.
“You just wouldn’t believe the people who have pulled together and tried to save these people, and there wasn’t any saving,” Williams said. “Most of them were probably dead.”
— In the chaos, ‘I got trampled’
Cassandra Lopez, 23, said she first thought the gunshots were part of the music.
She and five of her friends were at Ned Peppers for a “normal Saturday night” when they heard what she said were about 25 shots.
“I told my friend I was going to go to the back patio because I needed some air,” Lopez said Sunday in a telephone interview. “It was really hot in there. As I was walking towards the back, guns just started going off like crazy.”
“The next thing I knew, bodies were hitting the floor,” she added. “People were screaming and crying. I was on the floor, I couldn’t get up, I got trampled.”
In all, Lopez said she was on the floor for roughly two minutes, until someone helped her up and escorted her to safety. She told the police: “We just couldn’t get up. Too many people. Shoes everywhere.”
Lopez said she was injured in the chaos, but had not yet gone to the hospital to seek treatment. “I have a couple of pieces of glass that’s stuck in my foot,” she said. “Little shards. I’m banged up all over. My ribs are bruised, my knees are bruised. I lost my shoes, my clothes are ruined.”
She said none of her friends was seriously injured. The shooting took place outside the bar.
“It’s crazy, we can’t even go to a bar and have a drink without something like this happening,” she said.
— The suspect’s family’s house is searched
BELLBROOK, Ohio — Police searched a house in a quiet suburb southeast of Dayton early Sunday morning, where the man identified by the officials as the gunman, Connor S. Betts, lived with his parents.
The house is on a cul-de-sac that had been blocked on Sunday with temporary barriers, a strange sight in a neighborhood of otherwise peaceful homes of freshly mowed lawns and people doing yard work.
“Just like everybody else in the world, you don’t expect it to be a few blocks from your place,” said Brian Harris, who was standing up the street with his wife, Diane; they own a machine shop. “This is one of the safest places,” Diane Harris said.
Nikki Peralli, 25, remembered Betts only as “tall, skinny and brown-haired.”
Brad Howard, 25, had known him since before kindergarten and rode the bus with him to school for years, talking about rock bands like the Red Hot Chili Peppers.
Howard added, “Obviously, if you’re going to go and make an action like that — if you’re going to do that — there’s clearly something that had caused that in his mind.”
He had not talked with Betts for months, he said. “I had a bunch of missed calls, I opened my phone,” he said. “It was just another one of those things, just a kick in the teeth.”
— Police officers were nearby, potentially averting a bigger tragedy.
At least nine people were killed and at least 27 were wounded in the Dayton shooting, the second deadly American mass shooting in less than 24 hours and the third in a week.
The shooting began at 1:07 a.m. on East Fifth Street in the city’s Oregon entertainment district, which was bustling with more than 1,000 late-night revelers enjoying a warm summer evening, Mayor Nan Whaley said. Uniformed officers on routine patrol in the area responded, shooting and killing the gunman within one minute of his first gunshots, she said.
“While this is a terribly sad day for our city, I am amazed by the quick response of Dayton Police that saved literally hundreds of lives,” she said at a news conference.
Whaley said that the mayors of some 50 cities around the nation had contacted her. “Sadly, this isn’t something only the city of Dayton has experienced,” she said. “It’s sad to me that now Dayton is one of these communities as well.”
Whaley said that victims, including one who is in critical condition and several who were in serious condition, were receiving treatment at local hospitals.
An employee at Ned Peppers, a bar on the street, wrote in a post on Instagram that “all of our staff is safe and our hearts go out to everyone involved as we gather information.”
— Little was immediately known about the gunman.
Police have not identified a motive for the attack.
The gunman appeared ready to exact an even higher toll. He was outfitted in body armor, carried an “AK-style rifle” with .223-caliber ammunition and multiple high-capacity magazines, Whaley said.
There were no immediate clues to what might have motivated him, the police said, and no manifesto or social media presence has been found so far.
“We understand that the public wants to know who this person is, and that will be released,” said Carper, Dayton’s assistant chief of police. “Obviously, we’re working very hard to give the public an answer as to what the motivation might have been.”
— A particularly brutal week for gun violence.
It was the latest tragedy in one of the worst weeks in memory for gun violence in the United States. The shooting came less than a day after a gunman in El Paso left at least 20 dead and 26 others wounded inside a Walmart store. Last week, a gunman killed three people and wounded 13 others in a shooting at a garlic festival in Gilroy, California.
In all, there have been at least 32 mass shootings, defined as three or more killings in a single episode, in the United States this year.
On Twitter, most of the trending topics — the subjects talked about the most — were about gun violence. At one point Sunday morning, so many people used the phrase “another shooting” it became one of the nation’s top 10 topics.
Rod Rosenstein, the former deputy attorney general, wrote on Twitter late Saturday that “killing random civilians to spread a political message is terrorism.”
“FBI classifies it as domestic terrorism, but ‘white terrorism’ is more precise,” Rosenstein said on Twitter. “Many of the killers are lone-wolf losers indoctrinated to hate through the internet, just like Islamic terrorists.”
— Trump and Gov. DeWine express condolences.
President Donald Trump weighed in on both of the weekend’s mass shootings early Sunday, writing on Twitter, “God bless the people of El Paso Texas. God bless the people of Dayton, Ohio.”
In a second post, he wrote: “The F.B.I., local and state law enforcement are working together in El Paso and in Dayton, Ohio. Information is rapidly being accumulated in Dayton.” He added: “Law enforcement was very rapid in both instances. Updates will be given throughout the day!”
Gov. Mike DeWine of Ohio released a statement Sunday expressing grief.
“Fran and I are absolutely heartbroken over the horrible attack that occurred this morning in Dayton,” he said, referring to his wife. “We join those across Ohio and this country in offering our prayers to victims and their families.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.