Atlanta shooting: One person was killed and four others hospitalised in a shooting at a medical building in Atlanta on Wednesday. Hours later, police arrested a former US Coast Guardsman who had fled the scene after carjacking a vehicle, authorities said.
Identified as Deion Patterson, 24, the suspected gunman was taken into custody without incident after an undercover officer spotted him north of the city in suburban Cobb County. He was arrested several hours after the 12:30 p.m. shooting at the Northside Medical facility, police said.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in an emailed statement that the woman killed was one of its employees, but did not identify her. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution newspaper identified the slain woman as Amy St. Pierre, citing her husband Julian St. Pierre.
Motive not yet known
The motive for the shooting, and whether the suspect knew or targeted any of his victims, had yet to be determined, police said.
“We know that he had an appointment at the facility, but why he did what he did, all of that is under investigation,” Atlanta’s deputy police chief of criminal investigations, Charles Hampton, said at a news briefing after the arrest.
Atlanta Police Chief Darin Schierbaum told an earlier press conference that it was too early in the investigation to determine if the five women who were shot were patients or employees.
Injured women critical
The woman who died was 39. The four wounded women ranged in age from 25 to 71, media reported. Three of them were in critical condition and underwent surgery at Grady Memorial Hospital, officials said. The fourth was treated at the hospital’s emergency room.
Schierbaum described them as “fighting for their lives.”
Hampton said the gunman opened fire with a pistol and was only inside the medical center for about two minutes, then fled on foot and headed to a nearby gasoline station, where he commandeered a pickup truck that had been left running unattended and drove away.
Police responded to an active shooter just after 12:30 p.m. local time in the midtown section of the city, the Atlanta Police Department said in a tweet.
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