At least four people were killed on Wednesday by a gunman in a hospital building in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in the southern United States, local police said. The suspect committed suicide.
“We now have five dead, including the shooter,” in a shootout at St. Francis Hospital, Tulsa police said on Twitter.
Authorities in Oklahoma’s second-largest city responded at 4:56 p.m. (11:56 p.m. in Switzerland) and headed to the second floor of a building where gunshots were ringing out, the deputy police chief said.
The shooter was armed with a rifle and a pistol and appears to have committed suicide on the spot, according to the same source. The suspect, who has not yet been identified by authorities, is a black male between the ages of 35 and 40.
Biden informed
“I saw the helicopters and I heard all kinds of noises,” Elizabeth Buchner, 43, who lives in a house just behind the building where the killings took place, told AFP.
“I was there a little earlier in the day,” added this legal assistant, who said she was relieved by the speed and efficiency of the police intervention.
US President Joe Biden has been updated on the shooting, the White House said. She says she is monitoring the situation closely and offering local authorities the assistance they need.
This shooting comes a few days after the massacre perpetrated by a gunman in the elementary school of Uvalde, in Texas, which left 21 dead, including 19 children, and a racist killing, which left ten dead within the black community in Buffalo, upstate New York.
In the United States, shootings in public places are a recurring scourge that successive governments have so far been powerless to stem.
/ATS