County attorney says injured workers in Neb. cold-storage shootings may have been targeted

Official: Shooter may have targeted Neb. workers

OMAHA, Neb. — Three employees wounded in a shooting this week at a cold-storage warehouse in southeast Nebraska don’t appear to be random victims, a prosecutor said Saturday.

Saline County Attorney Tad Eickman told the Associated Press that authorities are trying to determine why Akouch Kashoual shot those workers and not others at the Americold Logistics plant in Crete.

Authorities have said Kashoual, a 26-year-old Sudanese immigrant, entered a break room Wednesday night and started firing a handgun, wounding three employees — including a woman who was shot 11 times — before going outside and killing himself.

“There were a number of people in the break room when the shooter went into the room. … He didn’t just open fire on anybody,” Eickman said.

The Omaha World-Herald first reported similar comments from Eickman.

Eickman said an autopsy was done Friday on Kashoual’s body but he didn’t yet have the results.

Kashoual’s brother, John Bol, has said his brother was “a good kid,” and he thinks the motive for the shootings would be found by talking with his brother’s co-workers.

Eickman said investigators were still waiting to talk to the most seriously wounded victim, 40-year-old Elizabeth Canas, who cannot yet respond to questions. She was listed in critical condition Saturday, according to a spokeswoman at BryanLGH Medical Center in Lincoln.

The other two victims — 23-year-old Renee Villareal, who was shot four times, and 42-year-old Paul Rivera — were released from hospitals Thursday. The three people wounded all live in Crete.

Eickman has said investigators included in their file a printout of Kashoual’s Facebook page, in which the last posting made just hours before the shooting declared, “Life is unfair it doesn’t matter whatever you do to make things right. So tell me what to do to keep living in this world of ours!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”

Bol said Kashoual fled to Egypt with their family when civil war erupted in southern Sudan. From there, Kashoual moved to Buffalo, N.Y., around 2003, and came to Nebraska about a year later.