Parents: Unsure if slain daughter knew grocery store gunman

Grocery store worker Krystle Dikes and shopper Rachelle Godfread were killed by 22-year-old gunman Shawn Walter Bair on Wednesday.

BRISTOL, Ind. — The parents of a 20-year-old woman fatally shot while working at a northern Indiana grocery store say they don't know whether their daughter knew her killer.
Krystle Dikes' parents, Juanita Whitacre, of Bristol, and Shaun Dikes, of Shipshewana, spoke Saturday about their daughter, who police say was killed Wednesday night along with shopper Rachelle Godfread, 44, by 22-year-old gunman Shawn Walter Bair. Bair was shot and killed by police moments later.
Whitacre and Shaun Dikes said their daughter made friends easily but they don't know whether she knew Bair, though both had attended Elkhart Central High School.
"She knew so many people. It's entirely possible she knew him. She knew everybody, it seemed like," Whitacre said. "But as far as any prior relationship, we have no clue."
Whitacre said she had lunch with her daughter on Wednesday, the day Krystle Dikes was killed.
"We talked about jobs. We talked about boys. We talked about school. We talked about all the things moms talk about with their daughters," Whitacre said Saturday. "We talked about her possibly going to live with her grandpa, or living with her father or me. We talked about all the possibilities she had."
Those possibilities came to an end hours later. Police say Bair entered Martin's Super Market about 9:30 p.m. Wednesday and about a half-hour later fatally shot Dikes as she stocked shelves and Godfread as she shopped.
Police have said they don't know the motive for the shootings.
Dikes' parents described her as big-hearted and independent with a contagious laugh. They said she dreamed of opening a child care center for children with special needs.
She attended Elkhart Central High School, obtained her GED and lived in Muncie for a while but moved back to northern Indiana recently after getting the job at Martin's. She had lived with friends the past two years and was looking forward to getting her own apartment.
"She wanted to see what it was like to leave and have everything in the same place when she got back home and to not have to share everything with somebody and have people eating her food, and all those kinds of things," Whitacre said.
Her parents, along with their spouses, said they have been overwhelmed by the support they have received from throughout the community and around the world, saying they have been contacted by strangers expressing support through telephone messages, letters and through Facebook.
Shaun Dikes was asked how he finds the strength to go on.
"I don't think you do," he said. "You just keep putting a foot forward. I don't think it's a question of finding strength. It's just a question of trying out how to move forward. Because I don't feel very strong right now."
Whitacre said the shock and grief remain very raw.
"I'm still falling apart in waves," she said. "The mornings are awful. Waking up and realizing that it wasn't a bad dream and it's real. That she's not coming back. I'm going to have to miss her every day for the rest of my life."

2 nabbed at Texas border in Target credit card fraud case

A shopping cart is seen in a Target store on December 19, 2013 in Miami, Florida. Target announced that about 40 million credit and debit card accounts of customers who made purchases by swiping their cards at terminals in its U.S. stores between November 27 and December 15 may have been stolen.

Police said the cards used by 27-year-old Mary Carmen Garcia and 28-year-old Daniel Guardiola Dominguez carried the account information of South Texas residents.

McALLEN, Texas — Account information stolen during the Target security breach is now being divided up and sold off regionally, a South Texas police chief said Monday following the arrest of two Mexican citizens who authorities say arrived at the border with 96 fraudulent credit cards.
McAllen Police Chief Victor Rodriguez said Mary Carmen Garcia, 27, and Daniel Guardiola Dominguez, 28, both of Monterrey, Mexico, used cards containing the account information of South Texas residents. Rodriguez said they were used to buy tens of thousands of dollars' worth of merchandise at national retailers in the area including Best Buy, Wal-Mart and Toys R Us.
Related: Target data breach saga is starting to resemble an international spy thriller
"They're obviously selling the data sets by region," Rodriguez said.
Garcia and Guardiola were both being held Monday on state fraud charges. It was not immediately known whether they had retained lawyers.
Rodriguez said he did not know whether they were the first arrests related to the Target breach. Target did not immediately return phone and email messages left Monday, which was Martin Luther King Jr. Day. The Minneapolis-based company said last week that it has stopped more than a dozen operations that sought to scam breach victims by way of email, phone calls and text messages.
McAllen police began working with the U.S. Secret Service after a number of area retailers were hit with fraudulent purchases on Jan. 12. The Secret Service confirmed that the fraudulent accounts traced back to the original Target data breach from late last year. Investigators fanned out to McAllen-area merchants and reviewed "miles of video" looking for the fraudsters, Rodriguez said. From that, they were able to identify two people and a car with Mexican license plates.
With the help of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, investigators confirmed the identities of their suspects from immigration records of when they had entered Texas in the same vehicle. Police prepared arrest warrants last week and waited for them to return.
On Sunday morning, federal officials alerted police that their two suspects were at the Anzalduas International Bridge trying to re-enter the U.S. They were carrying 96 fraudulent cards, Rodriguez said.
Investigators believe the two were involved in both the acquisition of the fraudulent account data and the production of the cards, but only part of what must have been a much broader conspiracy. Rodriguez said investigators suspect Garcia and Guardiola were singling out Sundays for their shopping sprees hoping that the banks would not be as quick to detect the fraud.
With the amount of electronics and other merchandise purchased on Jan. 12, Rodriguez said the two would have needed an "army" to move it all.
Rodriguez also alluded to a link with Eastern Europe or Russia, but did not provide additional details. He said he expected Garcia and Guardiola to eventually face federal charges.
South Texas authorities have seen large-scale fraudulent credit card schemes before, including one in which they seized machines used to upload information to the cards' magnetic strips.
The Target security breach is believed to have involved 40 million credit and debit card accounts and the personal information of 70 million customers.

Gunman shot dead after killing two women in grocery store

A gunman killed a member of staff and a customer at an Indiana grocery store before being shot dead by police, officials said early Thursday.
The man had his gun pointed at a third person when officers arrived at Martin's Super Market in the city of Elkhart, Indiana State Police Sgt. Trent Smith said in a press conference early Thursday.
When he trained his weapon on the officers they shot him dead, Smith said.
"We're pretty confident that Elkart's quick response to the scene most definitely saved some lives tonight," Smith said.
Police said they do not know the relationship between the alleged shooter and the victims. They believe the women were a member of staff and a customer, one in her late teens or early twenties and the other in her mid-forties, Smith told the press conference in a video posted online by NBC affiliate WNDU.

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Smith said it was a "huge crime scene" and that shots had been fired from one end of the store to the next. The victims were found 10 to 12 aisles apart.
Police rushed to the scene shortly after 10 p.m. on Wednesday after receiving a 911 call. They heard gunshots when they arrived and rushed to the section of the store from which the shots were fired.
Smith described the gunman as white man in his twenties who lived in the area. He said he was armed with a semiautomatic handgun and a large knife.
When it was put to him at the press conference that people in the relatively small city of Elkhart were horrified that someone would start shooting in a supermarket, Smith said: "That's today's society, unfortunately. We live in that world.

"There's not a day that goes by where we are not learning about a school shooting, or at a business. We hoped that it would never come to our home, and here it is. You cannot walk around in life afraid."