The gunman who killed four people at a Tulsa hospital on Wednesday blamed a doctor at the facility for ongoing pain after back surgery and vowed to kill him and anyone who got in his way, police said Thursday.
“We grieve with the families after this senseless tragedy. We grieve with the co-workers,” Franklin said. “And we pray. We pray because we all need prayer.”
On May 19, Louis went into hospital for back surgery, and Phillips was the operating physician, Franklin said. After Louis was released from the hospital on May 24, he “called several times over several days complaining of pain and wanted additional treatment,” according to police.
Louis saw Phillips again on Tuesday, but called the doctor’s office on Wednesday, “again complaining of back pain and wanting additional assistance,” Franklin said. Then, at 2 p.m. on Wednesday, Louis purchased a semiautomatic rifle from a local gun store shortly before heading to St. Francis, police said.
“That semiautomatic rifle was an AR-15-style rifle,” Franklin said. Shortly thereafter, Louis began shooting with the rifle he had just purchased as well as a .40-caliber handgun he bought from a pawn shop on Sunday, police said. It remains unclear if law enforcement had been previously aware of Louis, Franklin said.
Authorities said they recovered a total of 37 bullet casings at the hospital — 30 from the AR-15-style rifle and seven from the handgun. Franklin told reporters that police recovered a letter the gunman had on him detailing how he was “killing Dr. Phillips and anyone who came in his way.”
“He blamed Dr. Phillips for the ongoing pain that came from the surgery,” Franklin said.
The assailant entered an orthopedic clinic on the second floor of St. Francis Hospital’s Natalie Building armed with a handgun and a rifle shortly before 5 p.m., Tulsa Police Capt. Richard Meulenberg told The Washington Post. Franklin told reporters that police received multiple 911 calls starting at 4:52 p.m. Wednesday.
Officers got to the scene within minutes, Franklin said, and the gunfire suddenly stopped. Police then found the attacker dead, apparently having killed himself moments earlier. Franklin said the last gunshot, which authorities believe was when Louis killed himself, happened at 4:58 p.m. — just 39 seconds after the first officers entered the Natalie Building.
The shooting came on the 101st anniversary of another horrible event in Tulsa, when a White mob pillaged a Black neighborhood, killing hundreds in one of the worst episodes of racial violence in the nation’s history. Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt (R) described Wednesday’s hospital attack as “a senseless act of violence and hatred.”
St. Francis chief executive Cliff Robertson asked people in Tulsa and across the country to pray for the victims, families and workers. He was choked up in remembering Phillips, Husan and Glenn.
“The three best people in the entire world, who are the most committed to doing what they do every day, didn’t deserve to die this way,” he said.
Wednesday’s attack came as the nation is reeling from several recent mass shootings that have renewed calls for tightening gun-control laws. As the hospital shooting unfolded, funerals were being held in Uvalde, Tex., after a gunman killed 19 students and two teachers at Robb Elementary School. And in New York, a White man accused of killing 10 people at a Buffalo grocery store on May 14 was indicted on 25 counts, including domestic terrorism and murder as a hate crime, authorities said. Payton Gendron, 18, burst into a Tops Friendly Markets store and shot 13 people — 11 of them Black, investigators said.
The House Judiciary Committee is poised on Thursday to advance legislation billed as an emergency response to recent mass shootings. The Protecting Our Kids Act, among other things, would raise the purchase age of an assault weapon from 18 to 21 years old and attempt to crack down on large-capacity magazines and “ghost guns.” It does not include an assault weapons ban.
The full Democratic-led House could vote on the package as early as next week, but it stands little chance in the evenly divided Senate to get 60 votes needed to advance the legislation. Democrats are hoping passage of a sweeping House bill will pressure Republicans in the Senate to join them in taking some action, even if it’s more modest.
On Thursday, Franklin described the Natalie Building as a five-story medical office building that is “an exceedingly complex environment” that makes it difficult for a tactical situation. Franklin said Louis was able to get into the hospital through a second-level parking level that’s connected to the building. As police cleared the area, first responders located victims and survivors scattered throughout the second floor.
Roughly a half-hour after the shooting, police received information from the Cherokee County Sheriff’s Office that a dispatcher got a call from a woman who said “her husband had killed several people at Dr. Phillips’s office,” Franklin said. Police emphasized that the woman did not know about Louis’s plans.
Tulsa Mayor G.T. Bynum (R), who said Wednesday that he was just focused on his city instead of calls for tougher gun legislation, reiterated that Tulsa would do whatever it could to help the families of the victims.
“There is nothing that we can say that will make this pain go away,” he said at Thursday’s news conference. “But we will be here to walk with you through that process every step of the way — have no doubt about that.”
Some doctors have become a target for escalating violence and tensions in recent years as prescribing of addictive painkillers has come under regulatory scrutiny amid the drug epidemic that has killed hundreds of thousands of Americans.
Last year, a man in Minnesota was arrested for allegedly shooting five people at a rural health clinic that denied him opioids. On Thursday, Gregory Paul Ulrich told a jury during his murder trial that he wanted to shoot as few people as he could during the deadly rampage.
“I had to bring attention to what these people did to me. I needed someone to listen,” he said.
In 2017, an Indiana man shot and killed a doctor who refused to prescribe opioid medication to his wife before turning the gun on himself.
Husen’s ex-husband, John Reckenbeil, remembered her on Thursday as “completely genuine” and “the smartest person in the room.” When Reckenbeil met her in 1999, he said, she was a physical therapist recovering from a “hellacious” car crash – and her own rehabilitation process helped her realize she wanted to become a doctor. Soon, he said, she enrolled in medical school.
She specialized in sports medicine, according to Saint Francis Health System.Reckenbeil, 47, has not spoken to Husen in years. They divorced more than a decade ago. But last year, he said, Husen mailed him some old photos of him and his late mother.
“She said that she was in the process of moving and then she found these pictures and she really wanted me to have them back… out of the goodness of her heart, knowing how much I miss and love my mother,” Reckenbeil said in a phone interview. “That’s how kind she was.”
A lawyer in South Carolina, Reckenbeil said he was already in the process of writing a letter about gun control to Republican Sens. Lindsey Graham and Tim Scott and also Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn). He started drafting it after last week’s mass shooting at an elementary school in Uvalde, Tex.
He planned to focus on Congress’s bipartisan push to regulate the purchase of ammonium nitrate – a chemical commonly used in fertilizer and explosives – after its use in deadly acts of terrorism, including the Oklahoma City bombing of 1995. Mass shootings demand similar action, he argued. He wants to see universal background checks for gun sales and other restrictions to “lessen the chilling effect of a single actor.”
“I’m just sick and tired of hearing that there’s just nothing you can do,” Reckenbeil said. Now the issue has hit home.
“Last week, there was something inside of me that I can’t take it anymore…. I don’t think I’ll stop now,” he said.
Other relatives of Husen did not immediately return The Post’s calls or declined to comment.
Robertson called Phillips “the consummate gentlemen,” and someone “we should all strive to emulate.”
“Of everybody the fact that some individual would go after Dr. Phillips is mind-blowing,” the St. Francis CEO said. “It is the ultimate loss for Tulsa and St. Francis.”
Hannah Knowles, Andrew Jeong, Clarence Williams, Tyler Pager, John Wagner and Eugene Scott contributed to this report.
