FORDYCE, Ark. — The sounds that filled the Mad Butcher supermarket on Tuesday — the beeping barcode scanners, the rattling of shopping carts and opening cash drawers — were familiar to customers and employees of the only grocery store in the small town of Fordyce, Arkansas.
But this was no normal day for the store, which reopened 11 days after opening. a gunman killed four people and wounded 10 others in Mad Butcher and the parking lot. Community leaders called Tuesday’s reopening an important part of the healing process for a town of 3,200 residents shaken by the mass shooting.
“It’s more than a store,” said Dallas County Sheriff Mike Knoedl, who responded to the shooting and attended the store’s reopening. “It’s a gathering place. Every time I’m in this store, I’m in there two or three times a week, you talk to the neighbors. Everybody knows everybody.”
The store’s closure left Fordyce without supermarket and few alternatives nearby after the shooting, leading to several food distribution points being set up throughout the community. While the city has a Walmart and discount stores with some food options, the nearest grocery stores are in neighboring towns that are at least a half hour away.
“This is Fordyce,” said Dick Rinehart, a mechanic who went to the store Tuesday to buy ribs, bread and deli meats. “Where would we go without this grocery store?”
Employees and volunteers who attended the reopening gave customers shirts that read #WeAreFordyceStrong. A banner with the same message has hung under the store’s green awning since the shooting. Memorials to the shooting victims, including flowers and crosses, stand near the store’s parking lot.
Kent J. Broughton, a pastor in Fordyce who loaded his cart with watermelons, said the store’s reopening creates a place for many people in the community to connect with family or friends.
“If you’re bored and you need something to do, if you want to see someone, just go to the grocery store,” Broughton said. “You’ll run into someone you know, a friend or a cousin or something, and then you move on.”
Police have not given a motive for the shooting. Travis Eugene Posey, 44, pleaded not guilty was convicted last week on four counts of first-degree murder and 10 counts of attempted first-degree murder and is being held without bail in a neighboring county jail. Posey was wounded after a shootout with police officers who responded to the attack, authorities said.
Police have said Posey was armed with a handgun and a shotgun, and multiple gunshot victims were found in the store and parking lot. Authorities have said Posey does not appear to have a personal connection to any of the victims.
The Mad Butcher reopened faster than two other supermarkets that were the scene of mass shootings in recent years. Buffalo, New York, supermarket reopened two months after a gunman killed 10 Black people in 2022. Boulder, Colorado, supermarket where 10 people died in 2021, was reopened almost a year later.
The store in Fordyce reopened the day after the last of four funerals for the victims, which ranged in age from 23 to 81Mayor John MacNichol said he never imagined a mass shooting would happen in his close-knit town, but he said he was proud of the community’s response.
“I think we’re doing well. I’m not saying we’re doing great,” MacNichol said. “But I think it’s bringing the community together and uniting us.”