Gunman kills 1 at hospital, commits suicide
Associated Press
RENO, NEV.
A suicidal gunman opened fire at a Reno hospital campus Tuesday, killing one person, wounding two others and sending police on a door-to-door search within the facility amid the chaos.
The Nevada Department of Public Safety said the wounded victims were in surgery, and one of them is a doctor. The gunman killed himself after the shooting.
Reno Deputy Police Chief Tom Robinson didn’t say how many shots were fired or what type of weapon was used, and didn’t release the identities of the male shooter or the dead and injured. He said, however, that investigators were confident no one else was involved.
“They are in the middle of a crime scene,” Robinson said of the two bodies still on the third floor of a four-story medical building. “We’re in the middle of an investigation, and we don’t want to compromise that by rushing up to identify them.”
Department of Public Safety spokeswoman Gail Powell said the wounded doctor is a woman but she had no more information about the shooting that happened at the Center for Advanced Medicine.
Robinson said there were about 100 people in the building when the shooting was reported at 2:05 p.m. Officers entered three to five minutes later and did “a systematic search, floor to floor, room to room,” Robinson said. “On the third floor of the building they located two people down and located two people injured and evacuated the injured parties,” he said.
Renown Regional Medical Center was put on lockdown amid the chaos of the shooting as law enforcement rushed to the scene and victims were treated by doctors on the hospital campus. More than three dozen police cars, including SWAT team vehicles, surrounded the sprawling medical complex and closed off a three-block area near downtown Reno.
Renown Regional Medical Center posted a notice on its website less than two hours after the shooting saying that operations had returned to normal at the main hospital but police were still investigating the shooting. About two dozen witnesses were taken to police headquarters for interviews.
“The biggest piece right now is we are trying desperately to reach the next of kin,” Robinson said.
At least one person was transported by ambulance from the building where the shooting happened to the Renown hospital’s emergency room, said Scott Walquist, a spokesman for the Regional Emergency Medical Services Authority.
Police initially said the gunman shot four people before killing himself, but they later said he wounded two people and killed another before committing suicide.