Police claim the suspect killed five individuals and wounded at least 21 after firing in West Texas.
A man murdered at least five individuals in West Texas after state troops stopped him when his car did not signal a left turn opened fire and escaped, killing over 20 individuals before being murdered by policemen outside the movie theater, officials said Saturday. He wounded three law enforcement agents.
The shooting began with an interstate stop in the heart of Texas oil country, where he exchanged a gunfire with the police, setting off a chaotic afternoon during which the suspect hijacked the U.S. Postal Service car and started shooting randomly near Odessa and Midland, striking various individuals. Cell phone clip showed individuals walking out of the movie theater, and as Odessa TV station KOSA aired on live TV, the police disrupted their show telling them they had to clear the region.
Police originally showed that there might be over one shooter, but Odessa Police Chief Michael Gerke subsequently said that there was only one.
“Once the police threw out that person of the image, there were no more casualties,” Gerke said.
The Texas suspect is dead after a police shootout
Gerke defined the suspect as a black man in the 30s. He didn’t name him or a motivation, but he said he had some concept who the gunman was.
The frightening chain of occurrences started when Texas State Troops attempted to pull over a gold vehicle mid-Saturday evening on Interstate 20 for doing not signal a left turn, Texas Department of Public Safety spokesperson Katherine Cesinger said. Before the vehicle went to a full halt, the conductor “stuck a rifle to the back window of his car and shot a few bullets” at the patrol car stopping him. The gunshots struck one of the two troops inside the patrol car, Cesinger said, after which the gunman fled “and continued to shoot innocent people,” including two police officers.
Gerke said that, in relation to the wounded policemen, there were at least 21 civilian casualties of the attack. He said that at probably five individuals had died. He did not tell whether the shooter was one of the five killed, and it was not clear whether he included the five killed among the at least 21 civilian casualties of the murder.
The shooting arrived just four weeks after a gunman murdered 22 individuals in the Texas border town of El Paso after opening a Walmart door. Texas Govoner Greg Abbott hosted two sessions this week with lawmakers on how to avoid more mass shootings in Texas. He said he would visit the region on Sunday.
Police think the menace has ended, but the courts stay vigilant.
The West Texas shooting Saturday takes the amount of mass murders in the U.S. so far to 25 this year, corresponding to all 2018, according to the AP / USATODAY / Northeastern University Mass Murder Database. The amount of deaths has also reached the peak of either 139 or 140 in the last year, based on whether the West Texas convict was one of the five police officers who said that he killed them.
Seven individuals stayed in critical condition at one hospital an hour after the West Texas shooting, said Russell Tippin, CEO of Odessa Medical Center Hospital. He said that they also took a baby under 2 years of age to another hospital. He also said that one person in the hospital had died, although it was not clear whether the victim was among the five dead that Gerke had reported.
Tippin said they handled 13 shot patients handled at the hospital on Saturday night but had not given their circumstances or any other data about the participants. Social workers and professional counselors are in the hospital to provide support to the families of shot victims, Tippin said. He also said that they had shut the hospital up because of the safety of employees and patients.
“The clinic is stable it’s safe,” Tippin said.
Dustin Fawcett was in his truck at the Starbucks in Odessa when he heard at least six shots ringing less than 50 yards behind him.
At first, he believed it might have been a tire blowing, but he heard more shots and saw a white sedan with a passenger window broken. That’s when he was thinking, “Oh dude, this is a shooting.”
Source: citynews
