Four people were killed Wednesday in a shooting at a medical building in the Midwestern U.S. state of Oklahoma, a police captain said.
Deputy Chief Jonathan Brooks of the Tulsa Police Department confirmed the number of dead and said the shooter also died, apparently from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
It was unclear what prompted the deadly assault. However, the unidentified gunman fired both a handgun and a rifle during the attack, Brooks said.
"Officers are currently going through every room in the building checking for additional threats," police said in a Facebook post just before 6 p.m.
Police responded to the call three minutes after dispatchers received the report and encountered the gunman one minute later, Brooks said.
Police Captain Richard Meulenberg also said multiple people were wounded.
Police and hospital officials said they were not ready to identify the dead.
St. Francis Health System locked down its campus Wednesday afternoon because of the shooting at the Natalie Medical Building. The Natalie building houses an outpatient surgery center and a breast health center.
'Rushing people out'
Tulsa resident Nicholas O'Brien, whose mother was in a nearby building when the shooting occurred, told reporters he rushed to the scene.
"They were rushing people out. I don't know if some of them were injured or just have been injured during the shooting, but some of them couldn't walk very well. But they were just kind of wobbling and stumbling and getting them out of there," he said.
"I was pretty anxious. So once I got here and then I heard that she [his mother] was OK, the shooter had been shot and was down, I felt a lot better. It still is horrible what happened," O'Brien said.
Agents from the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives were also at the scene, a spokesperson said.
President Joe Biden was briefed on the shooting. The White House was closely monitoring the situation and had reached out to state and local officials to offer support.
The shooting Wednesday came eight days after an 18-year-old gunman burst into Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, and killed 19 children and two teachers before being fatally shot himself, and just more than two weeks after a shooting at a Buffalo, New York, supermarket by a white man who is accused of killing 10 Black people in a racist attack.
The recent Memorial Day weekend saw multiple mass shootings nationwide, even as single-death incidents accounted for most gun fatalities.
