Source: Nuccio DiNuzzo / Getty
Despite his tragic murder spree, the confirmed gunman in Wednesday’s mass shooting at a brewery on Milwaukee has been described by friends and neighbors as the opposite of a homicidal maniac. Instead, Anthony Ferrill was remembered as someone who they couldn’t fathom being a mass shooter.
According to TMJ4 News, cops visited the home of the shooting suspect before 3 p.m. on Wednesday and they haven’t left as of Thursday. On Wednesday, a gunman shot and killed five employees at the Molson Coors brewery, a place the suspect worked, before killing himself.
“I feel bad for the family,” said Elizabeth LaPine, who lives across the street from the home being investigated. She explained the federal agents visited her home as many as six times to question her about the suspect, who was her neighbor.
“One of the policemen came and he had a picture and he asked me to identify the picture and then I knew who it was,” said LaPine.
TMJ4 News further reports, “Several neighbors also told TMJ4 News that the man, who is believed to be the shooter, was a friendly, family man. He lived at the home with his wife and young daughter.”
LaPine said Ferrill would “walk the dog” and “work on his cars.” Now she’s left baffled as to why such a quiet guy she knew would kill five co-workers before allegedly killing himself. “No inkling. No strange actions or anything, you know, that I ever saw,” said LaPine.
One social media source claims Ferrill experienced serious racial discrimination from white coworkers while employed at Molson Coors (formerly known as Miller Coors) and this could’ve led to the shooting. According to Facebook posts credited to a Milwaukee businessman named Tony Muhammad, the shooter “recently filed a civil lawsuit against Miller Coors’s racist work environment.”
Muhammad continued, “The racist white co-workers had hung a hangman noose on his locker. He was rehired after the lawsuit five years ago. The white racist male harassment continue when he returned to work at Miller Coors.”
“The racist white co-workers this time humiliated the 51-year-old African American male by pasting spade cards on his work locker and making his workday unbearable with white male racist antics,” Muhammad wrote without providing evidence of his claims. “The Brother evidently was forced over the edge of sanity to make a violent and act to end Miller Coors workforce racist harassment. Perhaps with this most recent reported incident of workforce white male racism against African American Miller Coors in the City of Milwaukee will make fair and equal employment for all a matter of private and public policy… Miller Coors has a long history of tolerating its white brewery worker racist behavior and acts against Black brewery workers.”
Miller Brewing Company has definitely had its share of racial discrimination lawsuits. A software developer named Syed Alam sued the company for racial discrimination, but his lawsuit was dismissed in 2013. A previous employment discrimination lawsuit that was filed by Alam against Miller was settled in 2006, according to the State Bar of Wisconsin.
These lawsuits followed another lawsuit from three former employees of Miller Brewing Co. in 1994. The lawsuit claimed employees were “subjected to racist name-calling and harassment” at a plant in New York, the Associated Press reported. At the time, it was “the third legal action against the Milwaukee-based brewer by black employees at the Fulton plant who say they faced discrimination.”
That lawsuit explained that “black employees were subjected to a variety of forms of racial harassment, including hearing racial slurs directed at them over a paging system and being exposed to a variety of racial epithets in plant graffiti.” It also said “the company took too long to start using a graffiti-resistant paint and to limit access to the plant’s public address system to prevent harassment.”
Molson Coors is the parent company for a few beers including Miller Lite, Coors Lite and Molson Canadian.
The allegations of the brewery gunman being the victim of workplace racism were unconfirmed. With that said, Milwaukee County declared racism a public health crisis in the city back in April. This declaration came after the Brookings Institution found the area to be the most segregated in America in 2018.
SEE ALSO:
Who Is Anthony Ferrill? Social Media Identifies Milwaukee Brewery Shooter As Longtime Employee
Everything To Know About Killed HBCU Student Whose Boyfriend Was Charged With Murder
