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Omar Sheriff Thornton, 34, shot and killed eight co-workers and wounded two others at the Hartford Distributors warehouse in Manchester, Connecticut, on Aug. 3, 2010, before dying of a self-inflicted gunshot wound, according to the police investigative report on the case.

Thornton had worked at the beer distributor for about two years, the last of them as a driver. That morning, he was called to a disciplinary meeting over stolen beer, shown surveillance video of himself loading cases into a vehicle, and given the choice of resigning or being fired, the report said. He signed a resignation letter, then minutes later took two 9 mm handguns out of the lunchbox he had carried in.

Investigators said the shooting lasted a little over a minute. The first call for help from inside the building reached dispatchers at 7:26 a.m. Killed were Francis Fazio Sr., 57; Douglas Scruton, 56; Edwin Kennison Jr., 49; William Ackerman Jr., 51; Bryan Cirigliano, 51; Craig Pepin, 60; Louis Felder, 50; and Victor James, 60. Cirigliano, the president of Teamsters Local 1035, and Felder, a supervisor, had both sat in on the disciplinary meeting. Executive vice president Steve Hollander, 50, and Jerome Rosenstein, 77, were wounded and survived.

Thornton called his mother three times over the following 10 minutes and told her he had shot "five of the most racist ones," the report said. At 7:55 a.m., he dialed 911 and reached a Connecticut State Police trooper working dispatch, who kept him on the line for about four minutes and tried to talk him into giving himself up. "You probably want to know the reason why I shot this place up," Thornton said, according to the recording state police released two days after the shooting. He said he had been treated badly at the warehouse, had taken the matter into his own hands, and that "I wish I could have got more of the people." He also said he did not intend to shoot anyone else, and ended the call by asking that his family be told he loved them. Officers found him dead at 8:12 a.m.

Thornton's relatives and his girlfriend said afterward that he had complained privately of racial harassment on the job, but investigators said they found no support for the claim. Releasing the report on May 12, 2011, Manchester police Chief Marc Montminy said Thornton had misread the company's seniority system, under which longer-serving drivers picked routes first, as racial favoritism. Investigators said Thornton never filed a complaint with the company or the union, and the Connecticut Commission on Human Rights and Opportunities said it had never received a complaint against Hartford Distributors. The union said 14 of the 69 dock workers were minorities. The report did note that a drawing of President Barack Obama with a noose around his neck had turned up on a bathroom wall months earlier, and that the company painted over it quickly.

On the first anniversary of the shooting, families, co-workers and friends dedicated a memorial on the company's grounds, eight stainless steel pillars set in a clearing in the woods near the warehouse. The Rotary Club of Manchester paid the roughly $60,000 cost.