The 18-year-old gunman who opened fire in a New Mexico neighborhood on Monday, randomly hitting passers-by, houses and cars, leaving three people dead and six wounded, was shot dead by police outside a church, according to authorities. .
The shooting occurred in a residential area of Farmington, New Mexico, a major business center and regional center for the fossil energy industry about 180 miles (290 km) northwest of Albuquerque.
Police responded “to find a chaotic scene where a male subject was actively shooting people in that neighborhood,” Baric Crum, deputy chief of operations for the Farmington Police Department, said at a news briefing hours later.
Three civilians were killed and six people were injured, including two officers struck in an exchange of fire with the suspect before police fatally shot him, according to Farmington police spokeswoman Shanice Gonzales.
He further said to Reuters by phone that the suspect had walked about a quarter-mile on foot shooting indiscriminately at passersby before the rampage ended outside the church where he was confronted by police.
“At this point, it appears to be purely random,” Farmington Police Chief Steve Hebbe said in a video message posted to his department’s Facebook page, calling the incident “devastating.”
Apparently aiming at “whatever came into his head to shoot,” the suspect opened fire with at least three weapons, one of them an AR-15-style rifle, Hebbe said. “At least six houses and three cars were shot at in the course of the event.”
The attacker, identified only as an 18-year-old, is believed to have acted alone, police said. No information was provided on any of the dead.
Part of the incident was captured in video footage posted to the social media platform TikTok and confirmed to be authentic by Gonzales.
In the footage, a man dressed in black is seen standing around the First Church of Christ Scientist, carrying what appears to be a gun, before he was fired upon by police in front of the building.
In the recording, the man apparently recording the video is heard describing the scene to another person and referring to the suspect who was walking in circles next to the church. He then says: “There is a person lying in the middle of the street.”
The two injured officers, one from the Farmington police department and one from the New Mexico State Police, are in stable condition at the hospital. The city official was later released, Hebbe said.
The conditions of the four injured civilians were not disclosed.
Gun violence prompted lockdowns at several public schools in Farmington, a city of about 46,000, until police determined the threat was over.
Farmington has experienced at least two other major deadly incidents of gun violence in recent years.
Farmington police last month killed an armed homeowner in his own home and then exchanged fire with his wife, after officers showed up at the wrong address in response to a domestic violence call.
Farmington was also the scene of a deadly high school shooting in December 2017 in which a gunman killed two students before taking his own life.
Monday’s killing was one of the latest of at least 225 recorded mass shootings in the United States this year, according to the nonprofit Gun Violence Archive. The group defines a mass shooting as any in which four or more people are injured or killed, not including the shooter.
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