Dozens of police officers chat outside the hospital, the scene of the Tulsa sniper attack Photo: J Pat Carter/Getty Images
Tulsa, Oklahoma, police said they found the shooter, who shot the St. Francis Wednesday afternoon with two weapons: a semiautomatic rifle and a handgun. The man was found dead in a room with two of the four victims of the tragedy. Authorities believe he shot himself.
“It was crazy inside, with hundreds of rooms and hundreds of people trying to get out of the building,” Tulsa Police Department Captain Richard Meulenberg told CNN.
The identities of the shooter and the victims were not released. Police said a call came in at the scene just before 5 p.m. Officers arrived within minutes and “heard gunshots in the building and that took them to the second floor,” said Tulsa Deputy Police Commissioner Eric Dalgleish.
About 10 people suffered minor injuries, but authorities are still trying to determine whether they were injured by gunfire or during the chaos of fleeing the scene. No officers were injured. Investigators are also looking into the shooter’s motivation, although it is believed the shooting was not indiscriminate.
“He went to that place on purpose, went to a very specific floor and fired for a very specific purpose. It was not an arbitrary shooting by an individual,” Meulenberg said.
This was the 233rd mass shooting of the year in the United States, according to the Gun Violence Archive quoted by website NPR. Gun violence is considered a mass shooting when four or more people are killed or wounded, not counting the shooter.
Just over a week ago, a young man armed with an AR15 assault rifle stormed a school in Uvalde, Texas, killing 19 children and two teachers before being shot dead by police.
Also yesterday, Payton Gendron, the young white man accused of killing 10 black people in a racist attack on a Buffalo supermarket in May, was charged with domestic terrorism. Gendron, 18, was also charged with 10 firstdegree murders, according to the New York state court’s website.