Old National Bank mass shooting site for sale, but no one wants it

Oct 14, 2024

The hardest I’ve ever worked was the summer of 1987 when I had a job with a contractor sandblasting the bleachers at Manual Stadium.

The guys in the union donned hoods, gloves, long sleeves and long pants and fired gazillions of little black pellets called slag at the old peeling paint, leaving a smooth metal surface.

I was a $10-per-hour laborer who kept huge canvass drop cloths arranged under the union guys, help break down and rebuild the scaffolds and keep the hefted the 50-pound bags of slag on my shoulder and carried them from the pallet to the sandblasting pot.

I thought it was the hardest job in the world. I didn’t know how good I had it.

If you gave me a choice these days between doing that job or E.P. Scherer’s job at Cushman & Wakefield, the company that owns, manages and sells commercial properties in Louisville, I’d take my old job back any day of the week.

Scherer, a broker for the firm, has what may well be the toughest job in Louisville. Maybe the toughest job in the Kentucky.

He’s the guy whose name appears on the sign outside the Preston Pointe building at 333 East Main: “AVAILABLE — FIRST FLOOR — 12,665 SF.”

That’s the office suite where a disturbed young man walked into his workplace at the Old National Bank on April 10, 2023, and began firing an AR-15 style assault weapon. He killed five people — Josh Barrick, 40; Juliana Farmer, 45; Deana Eckert, 57; Tommy Elliott, 63; and Jim Tutt Jr., 64. He injured nine others.

Now, it’s up to Scherer to sell the place where the shooting happened.

The building is set up like a condominium, with different people and companies owning different floors and office spaces.

It would be hard enough to sell any floor in a downtown office building right now simply because of what has happened to our downtown since the COVID pandemic and Louisville's failure to bounce back like many other cities.

But this is different.

Who wants to be in a place where people experienced the horrors that went on there 16 months ago, where so many good people were killed and injured.

Scherer told me in an email that Cushman & Wakefield waited more than a year after the shooting to advertise that the office space was on the market. According to the company’s website, the price is negotiable.

The response has been less than enthusiastic.

“There has not been any interest in the space to this point,” Sherer said. “I do feel the lack of interest has more to do with the shooting, but the slow market certainly doesn’t help.”

Scherer said his company is also trying to sell and rent space elsewhere in the building and, while there has been interest in it, he’s not been able to sell or rent it. “I have had a few people look at the space that we have for sale and lease on the 5th floor that didn’t seem to mind that there had been a shooting in the building.

It’s a problem people have dealt with across the country increasingly since we’ve had this rash of workplace and mass shootings that have left so many people dead over the years.

What do you do with a place where so many people died so tragically?

In other places where mass shootings have occurred, what has happened to the shooting sites has been a mixed bag.

The Las Vegas Village, the music venue where 60 died in 2017 in the nation’s deadliest mass killing, is now a parking lot, according to the Las Vegas Review-Journal. There are plans to turn the site of the Pulse Nightclub in Orlando, where 49 died, into a memorial one day.

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Other sites of mass shootings that have been torn down include Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut; Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas; the building at Marjory Stoneman-Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, where the 2018 shooting took place; and the library at Columbine High School in Colorado.

McDonald's tried to reopen its San Ysidro, California, restaurant after a 1984 shooting left 22 people dead, but the company bowed to public pressure and razed it rather than resuming business there. It’s now a memorial on a college campus.

But other mass shooting locations reopened — either as what they were before the shooting or as something else.

Luby’s Restaurant in Killeen, Texas, reopened after a 1991 shooting killed 23. It’s now the New Yank Sing restaurant. A Walmart in El Paso reopened three months after a 2019 shooting killed 23, and the Edmond, Oklahoma, Post Office where 14 people died in 1986 is still in use.

Of the 28 most deadly mass shootings in the United States that happened in churches, schools, government buildings and businesses, at least 12 never reopened and were torn down. And one business never reopened, but as far as I can tell, the building is still there.

Standard Gravure, in Louisville, reopened after the 1989 shooting in which a disgruntled former employee killed eight and injured 12. But it closed three years later and was eventually torn down.

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The Preston Pointe building poses a problem some of the others don’t or didn't: You can hardly tear down the first floor of an eight-story building.

Scherer said he doesn’t know what Old National Bank — which never reopened the Preston Pointe location and moved to 400 West Market St. after the shooting — will do with the space if it can’t sell it.

Maybe they can give it to a nonprofit group — perhaps an anti-gun organization like Moms Demand Action, Giffords, Brady or Everytown for Gun Safety, which could use the space as offices and a museum of gun violence with a memorial to victims so we never forget what happened there.

As if we could.

In the meantime, Sherer's got the hardest job around — a damn sight harder than lifting 50-pound bags of slag.

Joseph Gerth can be reached at 502-582-4702 or by email at [email protected].