AN OHIO GUNMAN has killed seven people, including his girlfriend and her brother, before being shot and killed himself in an exchange of gunfire with police in a small town in the north-east of the state.
Witnesses told reporters at least one of the man’s victims was a child.
Police have not yet established a motive, and are yet to release the names or ages of the gunman or his victims. Officers have, however, provided a chronology of the shootings that began around 11am in a middle-class neighborhood of Copley, a town of about 14,000 west of Akron.
“A person running through the neighbourhood and firing a gun” prompted calls to police, the Copley Police Department said in a news release.
At one home, the gunman shot his girlfriend, ran to a home next door and shot her brother and four others, then chased two people through some yards and shot one of them, police said.
He went into a third home and shot another person before leaving and exchanging gunfire with a police officer and a former police officer.
One of the man’s victims was taken to a hospital. The person’s condition was not known Sunday evening.
The names and ages of the shooter and his victims weren’t being released until police could tell family members, some of whom were out of state, Copley police Sgt Eric Goodwin said.
The Akron Beacon Journal reported that two of those killed were local high school students. A third youth, an 11-year-old who did not attend the school, was also killed.
A neighbor, Gilbert Elie, said he was getting ready for church when he heard gunshots and cries for help in the wooded neighbourhood.
He went to a house across the street and said he found a shocking scene: the woman who lived there lying in the driveway, her husband shot near the garage, and their young granddaughter and another woman shot in the front seat of a vehicle, the windows apparently blown out by gunfire.
A third woman came out of the house next door and tried to talk to Elie, he said, but their brief exchange ended abruptly when a man followed her out of the house and shot her, sending the 75-year-old Elie running for safety behind a truck.
“She was talking to me, and he come up behind her and shot her, so I figured, maybe I’m next,” he told The Associated Press.
Copley Township is about 40 miles south of Cleveland.
To embed this post, copy the code below on your site
have your say