It’s been a year since a gunman opened fire at the Greenwood Park Mall, killing three and injuring two others before being fatally shot by an armed bystander.
On the afternoon of July 17, 2022, a 20-year-old gunman entered the mall at an entrance near the food court with a bag of guns. He went into the bathroom near the food court for an hour to prepare for the shooting.
He opened fire around 5:56 p.m., killing Indianapolis couple Pedro Pineda, 56, and Rosa Mirian Rivera de Pineda, 37, along with Victor Gomez, 30, also of Indianapolis. He also injured a 22-year-old female and a 12-year-old female before he was fatally shot by 22-year-old Seymour resident Elisjsha “Eli” Dicken, the armed bystander hailed as a “good Samaritan.”
The shooting itself lasted for 15 seconds, until the gunman was shot by Dicken.
In the days and weeks that followed, the community came together to remember and honor the victims. At the same time, more information came out about the gunman’s background.
The call
Greenwood Police Chief Jim Ison was at home when he received a call that there was an active shooter at the mall. Johnson County Sheriff Duane Burgess was the first person to notify Ison.
Typically, Ison is notified quickly through a process known as command notification. However, Burgess happened to be near his radio when he heard the call go out.
Ison’s first thoughts were whether the shooting was accidental or a drug deal gone bad. There had been a couple of accidental shootings at the mall in the past where people had accidentally discharged their weapons because they were carrying incorrectly.
Ison immediately left for the scene, with Burgess coincidentally behind him. First responders, both police and fire, were already on the scene by the time Ison left his home. The shooting was already over at this point, the gunman was already down.
After Ison arrived on the scene, he stopped some firefighters who had just left the mall to ask them what the situation was. They said the shooting was purely random.
“Immediately, the very first thing I did was ask dispatch over the radio to start Indianapolis FBI because I knew we were going to need additional resources,” Ison said Thursday. “From that point on, we set up a unified command and went through what we trained for.”
Over the next several hours, officers from Greenwood, Indianapolis and Indiana State Police systematically cleared the entire mall, making sure no one else was injured and no one else was in the mall. While police knew the gunman was down, they did not know if he was acting alone at first.
Outside the mall, witnesses told the Daily Journal that they heard several gunshots inside and ran out. One witness said they were ushered to the back of a store.
“I heard at least five shots from where I was … I was around the corner from where they started shooting,” Mark Tillbrey, a 16-year-old witness at the mall, said. “Everyone started running, and I started helping kids out.”
Victims remembered
The people who were killed in the shooting, Gomez and the Pinedas, were remembered for their work ethics and their love to help others.
Gomez was born in Florida, and was a 2010 graduate of Perry Meridian High School in Indianapolis. The owner of Tru Marble and Granite LLC in Indianapolis, his family described him as a loving and hard-working husband, father, son and friend who loved to help people.
“He will be greatly missed by his family and friends,” his obituary said.
Six days after the shooting, people from far and wide came to a grassy lot on West 30th Street in Indianapolis to raise funds for the Pineda’s funerals. Many of those in attendance were originally from Cara Sucia, El Salvador, as a large community of people from the town near the Guatemalan border had immigrated to work in Indianapolis.
One of those people was Hector Chicon, who met Pedro Pineda in Indianapolis 20 years ago when worked together at a drywall business.
“(Pedro Pineda) was a good guy and a working guy and he was not getting into any kind of trouble that I know,” Chicon said last year.
Sabrina Lopez, one of about 40 volunteers at the fundraiser, said she had known Pedro and Rosa Pineda her whole life. The community response was overwhelming, she said last year.
“They were positive influences in our Hispanic community,” Lopez said last year. “They were hardworking people, immigrants who came here like everyone else, for an American dream they accomplished. They were hard workers, positive, super helpful and ready to give. That’s who they were.”
A community comes together
Five days after the city of Greenwood was struck with tragedy, the community gathered to pray, heal and try to move past the mass shooting.
Religious leaders, city leaders and residents from Greenwood and Indianapolis sat on the lawn or gathered on the stage at the Greenwood Amphitheater for a prayer vigil for the victims, their families, the armed bystander, first responders, the community and the gunman’s family. The prayers and songs that rang out across the amphitheater spanned many religions — Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Sikh, Catholic and Protestant.
Greenwood Mayor Mark Myers said that during this week he found himself often asking “why,” trying to find an answer to how an event like this could happen in this community. He called on the community to become stronger and more resilient in the aftermath of the tragedy.
Muhammad Safder, a Beech Grove resident and board member of the Muslim Community Center, was with his 18-year-old daughter at the Greenwood Park Mall the day of the shooting, he recounted during the vigil. He and his daughter were spending time together at the mall as she wanted to spend some gift cards she received for graduation.
They were eating in the food court during what police say is the time the gunman was in the bathroom preparing, between 5 and 6 p.m. Safder’s daughter had originally asked they stay longer and eat dinner in the food court, but Safder decided they could eat at home and have a snack instead.
“We were sitting there complaining about pretzels and the quality of the pretzels,” Safder said last year. “It was shocking when I found out that actually the shooter was actually there when we were there.”
The ‘good Samaritan’
Dicken, the armed bystander who fatally shot the gunman from 40 yards away amid the shooting using a gun with a damaged sight, has been hailed as a ‘good Samaritan’ and called a ‘true hero’ by police. Dicken and his girlfriend were at the mall to get a smoothie they couldn’t get in the Columbus area at the time of the shooting.
“When the circumstances unfolded as they did, his first thought was simply, ‘I need to protect people. I need to stop this person from killing people,’” Dicken’s attorney Guy Relford told reporters last year.
Relford also said Dicken does not plan to make public comments and wants to just get back to his life. Taking a life is a traumatic experience, and is hard to recover from, Relford said.
Dicken has also received job officers from police departments asking him if he wants to join, however, he has repeatedly declined, Relford said. He’s also received messages from family members of the victims and from other people who have been in similar situations.
In March, Dicken was named the 2022 Outstanding Citizen of the Year during Greenwood VFW Post 5864’s annual community awards program. Myers nominated Dicken for the honor.
“Elisjsha Dicken is a true American hero,” Myers said. “He is a young man that when faced serious danger to his own life, he put his life on the line in order to save countless others.”
The investigation
As the investigation began in the shooting’s aftermath, Greenwood police received assistance from numerous agencies, including the FBI. The gunman’s motive was unknown, and it appeared he had no specific connection to the mall. He did live within walking distance of the mall, as he lived in Polo Run Apartments.
Law enforcement searched the gunman’s Greenwood apartment and found the oven turned on with his laptop and a can of butane inside it. The FBI took custody of the shooter’s laptop, but agents were unable to recover anything due to heat damage.
They also helped Greenwood police with unlocking the gunman’s phone, which had been found in a mall toilet. This process took months, with Greenwood police not receiving results until May.
Numerous warrants were also served over the last year as investigators dug into the gunman’s background and social media history.
There were allegations of abuse, neglect and truancy when the gunman was a child. In the months before the shooting, he was jobless and his brother and father had stopped financially supporting him. He was going to be evicted from his apartment prior to the shooting, Ison said in December.
Investigators found many images and videos on his phone that were of a similar nature to the gunman’s social media posts, which police had previously said had shown he had a fascination with Nazi Germany and mass shootings. In some comments, he seemed to almost idolize mass shooters.
During a press conference last year, police said the gunman’s ex-girlfriend said he was racist against Black and Hispanic people because of his experiences growing up in foster care. However, police are not able to conclusively say this was a factor in the shooting.
Police found an image of a handwritten suicide note from April 2020 on the phone, where the gunman alluded to wanting to shoot himself with a shotgun. They also found a note written by the gunman on June 18, 2022 — nearly a month before the mall shooting — where he again he said planned to shoot himself. Later that day, the gunman did an internet search for “how to go through with committing suicide.”
No information about the mall or his plans to carry out an attack were found on his phone, and the official motive for the shooting may never be known. But the gunman’s homicidal and suicidal tendencies had been building up for years, Ison said Thursday.
Ison also said he expected the news about the phone to be the last update on the investigation, which is now closed.
“I actually hate discussing (the shooting) again, because once again, it’s bringing him in this action into the spotlight,” Ison said. “Every time we do it, the victims’ families have to relive the tragedy and I would like to put it to bed.”
Reflections a year later
Active shooter incidents are something police hoped would never happen here, but had to prepare for. A year later, Ison is thankful for Dicken’s actions and for how first responders handled their response to the shooting.
“In the wake of recent similar incidents that gained a lot of criticism on how they were handled,” he said. “… I’m proud of the complete holistic response and the resolve of not only my officers, other first responders, but the community.”
The department did a critical incident debriefing and created an after-action report detailing their response to the mall shooting and how it could be improved. In December, local agencies held an active shooter training at Greenwood Community High School using the knowledge gained from the mall shooting response.
What officers and paramedics saw at the mall that day will stay with them, Ison said. Knowing that families and lives were forever changed is heart-wrenching, he said.
“That’s something that just never leaves you, never goes away,” he said.
The shooting brought the community closer together and also brought a heightened awareness to safety and looking out for each other, Mayor Mark Myers said Thursday. It’s important for people to remember Dicken’s actions, which saved a lot of lives, and the actions of first responders who “did not hesitate” to run into the mall despite the danger, he said.
“They all very bravely ran into the mall with the intention of protecting all of our citizens and residents over there. We’re very proud of them,” Myers said.
The city plans to mark the one-year anniversary of the shooting with moments of silence during Monday’s Board of Works and Common Council meetings, he said.
The shooting shocked the community right in its heart, and in the days after, many people had apprehension about going to the mall or out in public. But people did not allow evil to disrupt them anymore, Ison said.
“I was just in the mall the other day,” Ison said. “I remember thinking to myself, ‘I’m glad to see things back to normal. I’m glad to see people have not allowed the act of evil to disrupt our way of life and prevent us from doing the things that we enjoy.’”
