By BRUCE SCHREINER and DYLAN LOVAN
LONDON, Ky. — More than a dozen school districts shut down Monday across a wide swath of southeastern Kentucky as a grueling search stretched into a third day for a gunman who opened fire on an interstate highway and wounded five people over the weekend.
Searchers have been combing the rugged, hilly area since Saturday evening, when a gunman began shooting at drivers on Interstate 75 near London, a small city of about 8,000 people about 75 miles south of Lexington.
“We’re not going to quit until we do lay hands on him,” Laurel County Sheriff John Root said, with the search area covering thousands of acres.
Joseph A. Couch, 32, was named a suspect in the shooting after authorities recovered his SUV on a service road near the crime scene. They later found a semiautomatic weapon nearby that they believe was used in the shooting, said Deputy Gilbert Acciardo, a spokesperson for the sheriff’s office.
Christina DiNoto, who witnessed the shooting Saturday while driving on I-75, said Monday that it weighed heavily on her mind.
“To know that he’s still at large — that makes me nervous, honestly,” she said.
DiNoto, an IT project manager, said the shooting also unlocked a new kind of fear, “like you have to be scared to even just drive on the highways.”
Authorities vowed to keep up a relentless pursuit of the gunman in the densely wooded area as local residents worried about where the shooter might turn up next.
Administrators in Rockcastle County, just north of where the shooting took place, closed for the day, as did Knox County to the south. Classes also were canceled at three regional college campuses.
Donna Hess, who lives 10 miles from the shooting scene in rural Laurel County, agreed with the decision to close schools there. Both of her children, a first grader and preschooler, normally take the bus.
“I’d be afraid he’d try to hijack the bus and take the kids as hostages,” Hess said. “I’m worried about everybody because they don’t know where he’s at. I’m hoping they catch him soon. We don’t know what he’s capable of right now.”
Katie Patel, who works at a London motel, brought her 7-year-old son with her because schools were closed. Even he was worried about his 2-year-old sister when she went off to day care.
“He was questioning me: ‘Is she going to be safe?’” Patel said.
Capt. Richard Dalrymple of the Laurel County Sheriff’s Office said authorities are doing everything they can.
“The longer we continue, and the more area we clear and the more places we are sure he is not, the safer people are going to be,” he said. “And I’m confident eventually we’ll figure it out and we’ll find him.”
State police Master Trooper Scottie Pennington, a spokesman for the London post, said troopers are being brought in from across the state to aid in the search focused on a remote area about 8 miles north of London. He described the extensive search area as “walking in a jungle” with machetes needed to cut through thickets.
Couch most recently lived in Woodbine, a small community about 20 miles south of the shooting scene. Authorities said he purchased the weapon and about 1,000 rounds of ammunition Saturday morning in London.
Kentucky has few regulations on purchasing guns and carrying them in public. The state’s gun laws “are among the worst in the country” according to a report by Everytown For Gun Safety, a gun safety nonprofit group.
A man who fatally shot five co-workers at a Louisville bank in 2023 wrote in his journal that he was surprised he could buy an AR-15 and 120 rounds in less than an hour. He wrote that it was “so easy” despite his history of mental illness.
Kentucky legislators repealed a law in 2019 that required a permit for carrying a concealed weapon. The state also does not require a background check at the point of purchase.
Couch served in the National Guard for at least four years, Dalrymple said. The U.S. Army said in a statement that Couch was in the Army Reserve from March 2013 to January 2019 as a combat engineer who was a private when he left and had no deployments.
Authorities said the shooter fired 20 to 30 rounds, striking 12 vehicles on the interstate Saturday.
DiNoto, 39, was driving through Kentucky with a friend on her way back to Houston after visiting relatives in Rochester, New York, when they heard a loud noise Saturday and assumed a rock had hit her back windshield. Her friend wondered whether it was gunshots, but they quickly dismissed the possibility.
The driver of a truck in the next lane slumped over and pulled to the side of the road, but DiNoto assumed the cause was something like a tire blowout. They saw first responders barreling down the highway but didn’t realize there’d been a shooting until the friend’s dad called to check on them 90 minutes later.
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“We were in the middle of nowhere, Kentucky, and it was just like, what? Somebody was on an overpass shooting AR-15 at us?” DiNoto said.
Acciardo said authorities found Couch’s abandoned vehicle Saturday and an AR-15 rifle on Sunday in a wooded area near a highway where “he could have shot down upon the interstate.” A phone believed to be Couch’s was also found by law enforcement, but the battery had been taken out.
Specially trained officers were deployed through the night in strategic locations in the woods to prevent the shooter from slipping through, he said.
“We’ve got to get him,” Acciardo said.
Associated Press reporters Tara Copp in Washington, Leah Willingham in Charleston, West Virginia, and John Hanna in Topeka, Kansas, contributed to this story.
