According to police, four people, including a child, are dead after a suspect opened fire in an office building in southern California.
By late Wednesday there was little detail on the Orange, California incident, but Lt. Jen Amat from the Orange Police Department told reporters on site Four people died and the shooting suspect was injured and taken to a local hospital. He is in critical condition. Officers found a weapon, she said.
A woman was injured and hospitalized in critical condition, Amat said. Both the woman and the suspect suffered gunshot wounds, Amat said. She added that she did not know whether the suspect’s wound was “self-inflicted or not”.
There was no additional information about the suspect or the victims. Amat stressed that there was no ongoing threat to the public and that no information about weapons had been found on the ground.
“The information on the suspect is still under investigation,” said Amat.
Police received a call about gunfire that had arrived at the scene around 5:30 p.m. local time while the shooting was ongoing. according to the department’s Facebook page. When officers reached the West Lincoln Avenue building, “they looked into the suspect and there was a shootout involving an officer,” Amat said, although she did not specify whether police shot the suspect .
The police “located several victims at the scene, including deaths,” the department wrote on Facebook. Amat said the incident took place on the second floor of an office building that has been called an office building according to local reports.
Katie Porter MP, whose district is Orange, said she was saddened by reports of the shooting, adding, “I continue to keep the victims and their loved ones on my mind as we continue learning. My team and I will continue to monitor the situation closely . “
Amat said there had been no “such incident in the city of Orange” since 1997 when a gunman armed with an assault rifle attacked a California Department of Transportation maintenance yard. The suspect, a machine operator who was fired six weeks earlier, killed four people and wounded others, including a police officer, before the police killed him.
Orange is 30 miles south of Los Angeles.
The shootout comes after two more shootings in March, in which a total of 18 people died. In Colorado, 10 people were killed in a shooting in a supermarket. In Atlanta, A rampage over three different massage baths left eight people behind, including six women of Asian origin, dead.
“It’s such a tragedy for the victims, their families, our community and our police,” she said.
California Governor Gavin Newsom called the shootout “awful and heartbreaking. ”
“Our hearts go out to the families affected by this terrible tragedy tonight,” he tweeted.
Contributor: The Associated Press.
