“It was just crazy inside, with hundreds of rooms and hundreds of people trying to get out of the building,” Tulsa Police Captain Richard Meulenberg told CNN.
The mass shooting is the latest case across the country of first aid and civilians facing the threat of gun violence as Tulsa joins several cities mourning recent tragic attacks on public places of worship. and educational facilities. Law enforcement received a call shortly before 5 pm on Wednesday for a person with a firearm at Natalie’s medical building on the campus of St. Francis Hospital, Tulsa Deputy Chief of Police Eric Dalglish told a news conference.
Respondents, who arrived within minutes, “heard gunshots in the building and this directed them to the second floor,” Dalglish said.
The gunman was found dead by police while making their way into the building, Meulenberg said, and has not been publicly identified.
Police suspect the shooter’s fatal wounds were self-inflicted, and two firearms were found next to him – described by Meulenberg as a “semi-automatic rifle” and a “semi-automatic pistol” believed to have been used in the shooting. Two of the dead were found in the same room as the shooter, the police captain said.
It is unclear whether the four killed were medical staff, patients or visitors, said Dalglish, who said the shooting took place at an orthopedic center.
In addition, less than 10 people received non-life-threatening injuries, Meulenberg said. Authorities are trying to determine whether they were injured in the shooting or during the chaos of fleeing the scene, he said. No employees were injured.
Investigators are working to determine the shooter’s motive, although the shooting is not believed to be indiscriminate, Meulenberg told CNN’s Don Lemon.
“He went to this place very purposefully, went to a very specific floor and shot with a very specific target,” he said. “It wasn’t an accidental shooting by this man.”
Witnesses describe frantic first moments
Lachel Nathan told the CNN branch of KTUL that she arrived in her vehicle with her daughter-in-law and grandchildren to see a doctor when she saw many employees rushing to the complex.
“It’s awful, it’s sad. My daughter-in-law is from Buffalo, so she’s so close to home now that it’s not even safe to go out anymore, you know?” said Nathan.
Ten people were killed in a racist attack on a supermarket in Buffalo, New York, on May 14, a mass shooting followed by a bloody attack on a church in California on May 15 and a heartbreaking massacre at a primary school in South Texas on May 24.
“I mean, you see it on TV,” her daughter-in-law said, “but you don’t think it’s actually going to happen right in front of your eyes, so it’s a wake-up call for my kids, it can really happen anywhere and it’s very scary.”
“You can’t even go to the store, you can’t even go to school, now you can’t go to the doctor?”
Debra Proctor was in another building on the hospital campus for a meeting when she heard police sirens.
“Police were everywhere in the parking lot, up and down the surrounding blocks,” said Procter, a graduate nurse for more than four decades. “They were still arriving when I left.”
Cullen Davis, a lifelong resident of Tulsa, was waiting in traffic at around 5pm local time when she saw a number of police cars reacting to the scene.
A video she told CNN showed authorities running towards a building with weapons removed. Two police officers are seen pulling long weapons out of their trunks as more and more emergency vehicles rush to the scene.
“I just knew it was a shooting situation because I saw the police running with rifles,” Davis, 45, told CNN. “It simply came to my notice then.
The shooting took place in the “sacred place” of the city
The St. Francis Health System, which runs the hospital, said in a statement that some offices would be closed by the end of the week.
Oklahoma State Representative Melissa Provenzano, whose district includes the hospital, told CNN she was on campus on the morning of the shooting and called it “the center of our community.”
“It’s just one of the highlights of our city,” she said, crediting hospital staff there for saving her father’s life when he contracted Covid-19.
“This campus is sacred ground for our community,” said Tulsa Mayor GT Bynum, who also expressed “deep gratitude” for the first responders who did not hesitate to respond to this act of violence today.
“The men and women of the Tulsa Police Department did not hesitate,” the mayor said.
Provenzano also welcomed the effective response of the police, but called for more active work to curb such shootings in the future.
“I just can’t say enough good things about them,” she told police, “but do you know why they were needed at all?”
Pointing to access to weapons and the need for red flag laws, she added: “We can do much more here in Oklahoma to make these things preventable,” she said.
CNN’s Christina Maxouris, Elizabeth Joseph, Amanda Jackson, Caitlin Collins, Sharif Paget, Melissa Mackay and Elise Hammond contributed to this report.
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