The gunman who killed five people during a shooting rampage at the Molson Coors plant in Milwaukee once had a noose placed on his locker.
The company announced the incident on Tuesday. A spokesman said that the noose was put on 51-year-old Anthony Ferrill’s locker in 2015, although Ferrill, who is black, never saw the noose before it was removed, according to NBC News. Last month Ferrill, a longtime electrician at the facility, killed five people before fatally shooting himself.
One of Ferrill’s co-workers told the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel after the shooting that Ferrill thought he was being discriminated against at work because of his race, although police have not yet revealed a motive for the rampage.
“Our HR team brought it to his attention,” said Adam Collins, the chief communications and corporate affairs officer for Molson Coors. “There aren’t words to describe that; it’s awful.”
Collins said Ferrill did not file a formal complaint after the incident, and an internal company investigation was not able to find who placed the noose on his locker.
“We investigated it fully and tried to find video cameras and whatnot that we have inside the space to see if we could figure out who placed it there,” he said. Milwaukee police are aware of the incident.
Ferrill, who worked as an electrician with Molson Coors for 17 years prior to the shooting, reportedly believed that brewery workers had bugged his computer and were trying to spy on him.
“I was: ‘Are you serious, Anthony? What?’ We all kind of joked about it, saying we should maybe get him an aluminum hat. Things just started getting weird, but he was dead serious about it,” a co-worker said after the shooting.
Other co-workers said they were surprised by the act of violence.
“I never had a clue. I talked to him a couple of days ago, and he seemed fine to me,” co-worker Keith Giese said. “I had no idea that there was a problem, that somebody could snap like that.”
The shooting occurred at Milwaukee’s Molson Coors plant, formerly Miller Coors, which employs hundreds of workers. The facility is a sprawling complex with a mix of brewery facilities and corporate offices.
