A gunman killed eight people and wounded seven others – three critically – in a shooting at a mall in Allen, Texas before being fatally shot by a police officer who happened to be nearby, authorities said.
Dashcam video that circulated online showed a gunman step out of a vehicle outside the mall and immediately start shooting at people on the sidewalk. More than three dozen shots could be heard as the vehicle recording the video drove off.
Allen fire chief Jonathan Boyd said seven people including the shooter died at the scene. Nine victims were taken to area hospitals, but two of them died.
Three of the victims were in critical condition Saturday evening, Boyd said, and four were in stable condition.
An Allen police officer was in the area on an unrelated call when he heard shots at 3.36pm, the police department wrote on Facebook.
“The officer engaged the suspect and neutralized the threat. He then called for emergency personnel,” the agency wrote in the Facebook post.
Witnesses reported seeing children among the victims.
The White House said President Joe Biden had been briefed on the shooting and the administration had offered support to local officials. The Republican Texas governor, Greg Abbott, who has signed laws easing firearms restrictions after past mass shootings, called it an “unspeakable tragedy”.
Allen is a Texas community of about 100,000 people.
Mass shootings have become commonplace in the US, with at least 198 so far in 2023, the most at this point in the year since at least 2016, according to the Gun Violence Archive. The nonprofit group defines a mass shooting as any in which four or more victims are wounded or killed.
Congress has not been able to pass substantial gun control despite the constant deadly mass shootings.
Texas allows its residents to legally carry guns without a license or training. Last August, a federal judge struck down a Texas law raising the legal age for people to carry handguns from 18 to 21.
In 2019, a shooting at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas killed 23 people. A shooting at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas last year left 19 students and two teachers dead.
Abbott, a Republican, has supported keeping guns as accessible to the public as possible. That is the case even as a recent poll commissioned by Fox News, whose viewers are largely Republican, found that American voters favor gun control measures and worry that they will be victimized by firearms violence.
In the aftermath of the Allen shootings, Maxwell Gum, a 16-year-old shift leader at Wetzel’s Pretzels, told how he was on his lunch break when a family with limited English ran into the back of his store, urgently telling him, “Gun! Shoot!” as the sound of gunfire could be heard in the background.
He brought the family into the long delivery corridor that runs behind the mall’s stores, hoping it would be a safe place to hide. They found chaos.
“There were probably like 300 people pouring in from all the different doors,” Gum said. “People are freaking out, we’re hearing screaming.”
Fontayne Payton, 35, was at H&M when he heard the sound of gunshots through the headphones he was wearing.
“It was so loud, it sounded like it was right outside,” Payton said.
People in the store scattered before employees ushered the group into the fitting rooms and then a lockable back room, he said. When they were given the all-clear to leave, Payton saw the store had broken windows and a trail of blood to the door. Discarded sandals and bloodied clothes were laying nearby.
Once outside, Payton saw bodies.
“I pray it wasn’t kids, but it looked like kids,” he said. The bodies were covered in white towels, slumped over bags on the ground, he said.
“It broke me when I walked out to see that,” he said.
Further away, he saw the body of a heavyset man wearing all black. He assumed it was the shooter, Payton said, because unlike the other bodies it had not been covered up.
Tarakram Nunna, 25, and Ramakrishna Mullapudi, 26, said they saw what appeared to be three people lying motionless on the ground, including one who appeared to be a police officer and another who appeared to be a mall security guard.
Another shopper, Sharkie Mouli, 24, said he hid in a Banana Republic store during the shooting. As he left, he saw what appeared to be an unconscious police officer lying next to another unconscious person outside the outlet store.
“I have seen his gun lying right next to him and a guy who is like passing out right next to him,” Mouli said.
Stan and Mary Ann Greene were browsing in the Columbia sportswear store when the shooting started.
“We had just gotten in, just a couple minutes earlier, and we just heard a lot of loud popping,” Mary Ann Greene told The Associated Press.
Employees immediately rolled down the security gate and brought everyone to the rear of the store until police arrived and escorted them out, the Greenes said.
Eber Romero was at the Under Armour store when a cashier mentioned that there was a shooting.
As he left the store, Romero said, the mall appeared empty, and all the shops had their security gates down. That is when he started seeing broken glass and people who had been shot on the floor.
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Video footage from local media showed police officers hurrying shoppers out of the mall, with squad cars and emergency vehicles parked near entries.
Blood could be seen on sidewalks outside the mall and white sheets covering what appeared to be bodies.
Medical City Healthcare, which runs 16 hospitals in the area, said its trauma centers were treating eight of the wounded victims, who ranged in age from five to 61. (With Reuters and Associated Press)
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