U.S.
A suicidal gunman opened fire at a hospital campus in Reno, Nev., on Tuesday, killing one person and critically wounding two others before taking his own life.
The violence at the Renown Regional Medical Center sent police on a door-to-door search of one of the state's largest medical centers, held on lockdown for hours following the mid-afternoon chaos that sent staff streaming out of the building into chilly weather or left them stranded inside, huddling in locked rooms. Authorities and staff turned away arriving patients.
Police still aren't sure who the shooter was.
"As far as the suspect goes, we still don't have a solid identity yet, but we are working several leads on who he is," Reno Deputy Police Chief Tom Robinson said.
Police haven't released names of the victims, and Robinson said the gunman's motivation for shooting who he shot remains unclear.
"I wouldn't say they were targeted, but I don't think it was just random," he told reporters outside the medical building on the hospital campus. Investigators said they were confident no one else was involved.
The two wounded victims were in surgery Tuesday night and one of them is a female doctor, the Nevada Department of Public Safety said.
A witness at the hospital for a doctor's appointment told the Reno Gazette Journal that she had seen an injured woman receiving medical attention.
"I saw this woman with blood all over her being rushed past me to the ER," Reno resident Daranda Cone told the paper.
Chief 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.
Renown Regional Medical Center was put on lockdown 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.
The deadly shootings happened at the Center for Advanced Medicine section of the hospital.
"On the third floor of the building they located two people down and located two people injured and evacuated the injured parties," he said.
All three victims and the gunman suffered some kind of gunshot wound and were in the same general area on the building's third floor, Robinson said. He added it's not clear what kind of firearm the gunman used or if he had more than one.
At least one person was transported by ambulance from the building where the shooting happened to the Renown hospital's emergency room, less than a block away, said Scott Walquist, a spokesman for the Regional Emergency Medical Services Authority.
The shooting happened nearly two months after a 12-year-old boy opened fire at an area middle school, killing a math teacher before taking his own life. Two other students were treated for their injuries at Renown, the largest hospital in northern Nevada.
Al Jazeera and The Associated Press
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