A shooting during a Rhode Island youth hockey game on Monday left three people dead, including the shooter and three more hospitalized in critical condition, authorities said.
“We have three deceased. The suspect, and then we have two victims, and then we have three at the hospital,” Pawtucket Police Chief Tina Goncalves told reporters.
She said that someone helped bring a swift end to the violent scene by intervening and trying to subdue the shooter, who was at an arena to watch a family member’s hockey game.
Photo: Reuters
The shooter died from an apparent self-inflicted gun wound, she said, adding that authorities were still investigating.
“It appears that this was a targeted event, that it may be a family dispute,” she said.
Goncalves identified the shooter as Robert Dorgan, who she said also went by the name Roberta Esposito and was born in 1969.
The police chief did not provide further details about the shooter or the victims, except for saying it appeared that both victims who died were adults.
She said investigators were trying to piece together what happened and have spoken with scores of witnesses who were there inside Dennis M. Lynch Arena in Pawtucket, several kilometers outside the state capital, Providence.
They also were reviewing video taken from the hockey game.
At least 12 shots can be heard on unverified footage circulating on social media.
The teams initially continued playing, but as the staccato burst of gunfire continued, players fled to the edges of the rink or made a break for the exits, with spectators seen ducking for cover.
Outside the arena, tearful families and high school hockey players still in uniform were seen hugging before they boarded a bus to leave the area.
“After the gunshots me and my teammates ran right to the locker room,” one eyewitness, who was on the ice when the shots were fired, told local news station WJAR. “We pressed against the door and tried to stay safe down in there.”
Monday’s shooting came nearly two months after Rhode Island was rocked by a gun violence tragedy at Brown University, where a gunman killed two students and wounded nine others. That shooter went on to also fatally shoot a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor.
Authorities later found Claudio Neves Valente, 48, dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound at a New Hampshire storage facility.
“The fortunate thing is that the two incidents are not related, but it is very tragic,” Pawtucket Mayor Don Grebien said. “These are high-school kids. They were doing an event, they were playing with their families watching, a fun time and it turned into this.”
More than 400 mass shootings were recorded in the US last year, according to the Gun Violence Archive, which counts incidents where four or more people are shot or killed, not including the shooter.
Gun violence as a whole claimed at least 14,703 lives last year, not including suicides.
Additional reporting by AFP
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