A municipal employee on Friday sprayed gunfire “indiscriminately” in a government building complex in the US state of Virginia, police said, killing 12 people and wounding four in the latest mass shooting to rock the country.
The shooter was also killed after an extended gun battle with responding officers, in a scene that “best could be described as a war zone,” Virginia Beach police chief James Cervera told a news conference.
The shooting happened just after 4pm, when the gunman entered one of the buildings at the Virginia Beach municipal complex and “immediately began to indiscriminately fire on all of the victims,” Cervera said.
One victim was killed outside in his vehicle, while the others were found on all three floors of the building.
The shooter was armed with a .45-caliber handgun fitted with a sound suppressor, and he reloaded multiple times with extended magazines, Cervera said.
The four responding police officers “stopped this individual from committing more carnage in that building,” he added.
Police unsuccessfully tried to resuscitate the suspect after he was shot, Cervera said.
Authorities did not release the shooter’s name or speculate on his motives, aside from saying that he was a longtime employee of the public utilities department.
The wounded included a police officer, who was saved by his bulletproof vest. All were undergoing surgery on Friday night.
The building where the shooting took place in Virginia Beach — a city of 450,000 people about 320km southeast of Washington — housed the city’s public works and utilities offices and can have 400 people inside at any time.
“This is the most devastating day in the history of Virginia Beach,” Mayor Bobby Dyer told reporters. “The people involved are our friends, coworkers, neighbors and colleagues.”
Megan Banton, a public utilities employee, told local television station WVEC that during the chaos she and about 20 coworkers hid in an office, where they used a desk to wedge the door shut.
“We just wanted to try to keep everybody safe as much as we could and just trying to stay on the phone with 911, just because we wanted to make sure [police] were coming. They couldn’t come fast enough,” she said.
“We heard gunshots. We kept hearing gunshots and we kept hearing the cops saying, ‘Get down.’”
Banton said it felt “surreal” to have a mass shooting in her office building, and that she just wanted to go home and hug her family.
“I have an 11-month-old baby at home and all I could think about was him and trying to make it home to him,” she said.
According to the Washington-based Gun Violence Archive monitoring group, the shooting was the 150th mass shooting in the US this year, defined as a single event in which four or more people are shot or killed.
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