The calls, one of which came from an employee who witnessed Monday's attack while on a video conference meeting were shared on Wednesday by the Louisville Metropolitan Police Department.
Police identified the shooter in Louisville as Connor Sturgeon, who was employed at the Old National Bank's downtown branch at the time of the shooting. He was killed by police on Monday.
On Monday morning, amid a flurry of calls coming in from panicked bank employees as the shooting unfolded, a woman who identified herself as the suspect's mother called in to the city's emergency line.
Between shaky breaths, she told the operator she had heard from her son's roommate that he had left a note indicating he had a gun and was heading toward the bank.
"He's never hurt anyone, he's a really good kid," the woman, whose name was omitted from the recording, said.Â
"We don't even own guns, I don't know where he would have gotten a gun."
There have been 146 mass shootings in the United States so far in 2023, the most at this point in the year since 2016, according to the Gun Violence Archive. The nonprofit group defines a mass shooting as four or more shot or killed, not including the shooter.
Barely two weeks before the Louisville massacre, a former student at a private Christian school in Nashville shot and killed three nine-year-old students and three staff members. While mass shootings have become commonplace in the US, the shooting stunned the Tennessee city and the country.
The gunman's family, in a statement released on Wednesday, said he had suffered from mental health issues that they had been "actively addressing" before his rampage.
In the statement, released to a Louisville television station, the family said there were "never any warning signs or indications he was capable" of carrying out a mass shooting.
The station, Fox-affiliated WDRB, posted the statement on its website after receiving it from a lawyer for the family on Tuesday evening. Reuters could not independently verify the statement, and the station did not provide the lawyer's name.
