On a Wednesday afternoon in October 2018, 69-year-old Maurice Stallard, a Black male, was at a Kroger grocery store in Jeffersontown, Kentucky, with his 12-year-old grandson to buy poster board for a school project. It was a routine errand that turned into a scene of unimaginable horror. Inside the store, a man named Gregory Alan Bush pulled out a handgun and shot Stallard in the back of the head.
As Stallard lay on the floor, Bush continued to shoot him multiple times, killing him in front of his grandson.
After fatally shooting Stallard, Bush, a 51-year-old white man, calmly reholstered his weapon and walked out of the Kroger. In the parking lot, he encountered 67-year-old Vickie Lee Jones, another Black shopper, and shot her multiple times, ending her life as well. An armed bystander who witnessed the second shooting drew his own weapon and exchanged gunfire with Bush. During the confrontation, Bush reportedly told the armed citizen, 'Don't shoot me I won't shoot you. Whites don't shoot whites.' Bush was quickly apprehended by police who arrived at the scene.
The investigation that followed revealed a chilling racial motive behind the senseless violence. Authorities discovered that just minutes before the Kroger shooting, Bush had unsuccessfully tried to enter the First Baptist Church of Jeffersontown, a predominantly Black church. Bush was subsequently charged with two counts of murder, one count of attempted murder, and ten counts of wanton endangerment. Federal prosecutors also indicted him on multiple hate crime charges.
Gregory Bush ultimately pleaded guilty but mentally ill to the state charges and received a sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole. He also pleaded guilty to the federal hate crime charges, admitting in court that he had killed Maurice Stallard and Vickie Lee Jones because they were Black. For these federal crimes, he was given a second life sentence, ensuring he would spend the remainder of his days behind bars for the heinous acts of hatred and violence he committed that autumn day.
