Four people were killed, including a gunman, and multiple others were wounded in a shooting on Wednesday on a hospital campus in Tulsa, Oklahoma, police said.
Officers were still working to clear the St. Francis Hospital campus, the Tulsa Police Department said on Twitter.
A man armed with a rifle and handgun opened fire on Wednesday inside a medical building in Tulsa, Oklahoma, killing four people, police said, in the latest of a series of mass shootings in the United States. The shooter has also been shot dead.
“We now have five dead, including the shooter, in the active shooter situation at the Natalie Building on the St. Francis Hospital Campus,” Tulsa Police said.
The shooter also died, apparently of a self-inflicted wound, Tulsa’s deputy police chief Jonathan Brooks told reporters outside the St. Francis Hospital campus.
Brooks said police were trying to determine the man’s identity, but said he was aged between 35 and 40.
Wednesday’s incident in Tulsa came on the heels of mass shootings that have re-ignited debates about gun control. Two weeks before the Uvalde shooting, a white gunman killed 10 people at a supermarket in a Black neighborhood in Buffalo, New York.
Police in Tulsa said they were trying to determine the suspect’s identity, who they estimated was aged between 35 and 40, and had no details yet on his motive.
The Natalie Building contains doctors’ offices including an orthopedic center, Dalgleish said, adding he believed the victims included employees and patients.
The White House said President Joe Biden had been briefed on the shooting and offered support to state and local officials in Tulsa, a city of some 411,000 people that sits around 100 miles (160 km) northeast of the capital Oklahoma City.
Victims yet to be identified
Police and hospital officials said they were not ready to identify the dead.
St. Francis Health System locked down its campus Wednesday afternoon because of the situation at the Natalie Medical Building. The Natalie building houses an outpatient surgery center and a breast health center.
Tulsa resident Nicholas O’Brien, whose mother was in a nearby building when the shooting occurred, told reporters that he rushed to the scene.
“They were rushing people out. I don’t know if some of them were injured or just have been injured during the shooting, but some of them couldn’t walk very well. But they were just kind of wobbling and stumbling and getting them out of there,” he said.
President briefed on Tulsa shooting.
President Joe Biden has been briefed on the Tulsa shooting, the White House said in a statement, adding that the administration had offered support to local officials.
Despite the recent mass shootings, gun regulation faces deep resistance in the United States, from most Republicans and some rural-state Democrats.
Biden, who visited Uvalde over the weekend, promised earlier this week to “continue to push” for reform, saying: “I think things have gotten so bad that everybody is getting more rational about it.”
Some key federal lawmakers have also voiced cautious optimism and a bipartisan group of senators worked through the weekend to pursue possible areas of compromise.
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