MAQUOKETA, Iowa – Police remained stymied why a 23-year-old college student from an Omaha, Nebraska, suburb, targeted and killed three members of a family sleeping in a tent at a forest campground. Mitch Mortvedt, of the state Division of Criminal Investigation, said investigators have found no coonnection between the shooter, Anthony Sherwin, and the Cedar Falls family. Sherwin shot himself dead after the killings. Sherwin had been camping with his parents at the park. They too could not explain what happened. Sherwin’s mother, Cecilia Sherwin, described her son as kind, sensitive, an exceptional student, and an aspiring businessman. Answering an email query from the Associated Press, she said:
“We just arrived home and are trying to absorb the loss of our son and arriving home without him which is unfathomable, I didn’t think we had any tears left, but we still find ourselves breaking down and care deeply for the little boy and the loss of his family.”
Mortvedt acknowledged the parents had theorized at one point that someone else had killed the family and tat their son heard the shots and grabbed a firearm in the family’s vehicle for self-protection. Mortvedt, however, said evidence doesn’t support the parents’ theory. The best investigators can concuded, at least tentatively, that the shooting was a random act, Mortvedt said. He noted that police had interviewed the surviving child, 9-year-old Arlo Schmidt, but declined to go into detail. There have been reports that the boy may not have been in the tent when the shootings occurred. The Schmidts and Sherwins were in separate camp sites.
Schmidt family. This photo was snapped only a few months earlier.
Earlier: Four gun deaths at Iowa campground
Sherwin. The shooter had no criminal record in Omaha nor the suburb of LaVista where he lived with his parents. His only one prior contact with police was in 2017 when he walked into a police station to report someone had tried to use his insurance for dental work in Oklahoma. Sherwin later called police to report his insurance company had sent him someone else’s bill by mistake.