Gunman kills 4 at Tulsa hospital in Oklahoma
At least four people were killed Wednesday, June 1, in a shooting on a hospital campus in Tulsa, Oklahoma, police said. “It was just madness inside, with hundreds of rooms and hundreds of people trying to get out of the building,” Tulsa police Capt. Richard Meulenberg said.
Law enforcement officers received a call just before 5 PM about a person with a firearm at the Natalie Medical Building, a physicians’ office facility on the campus of Saint Francis Hospital, Tulsa police Deputy Chief Eric Dalgleish said at a news conference.
Responding officers who arrived within minutes “were hearing shots in the building, and that’s what directed them to the second floor,” Dalgleish said. The gunman was found dead by police as they worked their way inside the building, Meulenberg said, and has not been publicly identified. Police suspect the gunman’s fatal wounds were self-inflicted, and two firearms, described by Meulenberg as a semiautomatic rifle and a semiautomatic pistol, believed to have been used in the shooting were found next to him. Two of the deceased were found in the same room as the gunman, the police captain said.
In addition, fewer than 10 people suffered non-life-threatening injuries, Meulenberg said. Authorities are trying to determine if they were wounded by gunfire or during the chaos of escaping the scene, he said.
No officers were injured.
Investigators are working to determine the gunman’s motive, although the shooting was not believed to be indiscriminate. This comes as the US grapples with a series of mass shootings that have left communities across the country grieving. Less than three weeks ago, 10 people were killed in a racially motivated shooting at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York. Last week, an 18-year-old opened fire at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, killing 19 children and two teachers.
The embattled Uvalde school police chief who led the flawed law enforcement response spoke exclusively to CNN Wednesday after remaining out of the public eye for a week but declined to answer substantive questions about the massacre.