Police shot and killed Connor Sturgeon after he massacred five people at a bank in Louisville, Kentucky, on Monday; he will be examined for signs of Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy.
The Sturgeon family lawyer, Peter Palmer, confirmed that CTE testing would begin on Sturgeon’s brain to see if he had the disease.
Experts agree that the illness, which can only be diagnosed posthumously, can be brought on by a lifetime of concussions.
The Louisville Courier-Journal reports that Sturgeon had a history of sports-related concussions as a teen before the slaughter he committed at the Old National Bank, in which numerous individuals were also injured.
High-impact sports like football have been linked to CTE because players regularly engage in head-on collisions that cause mild to severe brain trauma. Wrestlers also frequently suffer from comparable forms of cerebral damage, which has led many to link the two activities.
Postmortem examinations have shown that some patients with CTE displayed bizarre behavior and violent tendencies in life.
His relatives said they had never seen anything in him that would make them think he could mass murder.
The family said although they still have many questions, they are committed to working closely with law authorities at all times and providing any information they want as they investigate this matter.
As a family, the Sturgeons said they had no words to describe the depth of their grief and despair at what their son Connor did to Louisville and its residents.
The 25-year-old used to work at the bank and played various sports at his high school just north of the city.
On Monday morning, he walked into the bank and began firing, purportedly broadcasting the bloodbath online.
Sturgeon fired a gun at a responding police officer, striking him in the head but missing.
Within five minutes of the initial 9-1-1 call, the police shot and killed him.
WAVE-TV shared a call with the media in which Sturgeon’s mother expressed suspicion that her son was responsible for the shooting.
Sturgeon’s roommate called her and said he had uncovered a message that indicated the man planned to act violently.
