Five people were killed yesterday by a former disgruntled employee at an RV-awning company called Fiamma in Orlando before he turned the gun on himself, the Orlando Sentinel reports. John Robert Neumann Jr., armed with a handgun, a large hunting knife and possibly smaller knives, walked into the company through a rear door. He roamed the building and reloaded his gun at least once, singling out his victims, said Orange County Sheriff Sheriff Jerry Demings. “One of the surviving witnesses said [Neumann] pointed the gun at her and told her to get out of there,” he said.
“Most of the victims were shot in the head; some were shot multiple times,” Demings said. He added that eight other people in the building were not injured. Neumann, 45, who was discharged from the Army in 1999, killed himself before deputies approached. He had been fired in April from Fiamma, which is based in Italy. It’s unclear what motivated the attack. Neumann had a “negative relationship” with one of the victims, the sheriff said. Demings said his office responded to Fiamma about three years ago, when Neumann allegedly battered an employee. The shooting comes a week before the one-year anniversary of the Pulse nightclub massacre that killed 49 people, but it is not a terrorist attack, officials said. There were 417 homicides at workplaces across the U.S. in 2015, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Three hundred fifty-four of those were shootings, a 15 percent increase from the previous year. It was the first time the number of shootings had increased since 2012.