GREENWOOD, Ind. (AP) — Three people were fatally shot and two were injured, including a 12-year-old girl, at an Indiana mall after a man with a rifle opened fire in a food court and an armed civilian shot and killed him, police said.
The man entered the Greenwood Park Mall on Sunday evening with a rifle and several magazines of ammunition and began firing in the food court, Greenwood Police Department Chief Jim Ison said.
The three people who died were in addition to the man with the rifle. The identity of the gunman and a possible motive weren’t immediately known.
A 22-year-old from nearby Bartholomew County who was legally carrying a firearm at the mall shot and killed the gunman, Ison said at a news conference.
The mass shooting was just the latest to unnerve Americans in 2022. Schools, churches, grocery stores and a July Fourth parade in Highland Park, Illinois, have all become killing grounds in recent months. Still, the reality of America’s staggering murder rate can often be seen more clearly in individual deaths that rarely make the news.
Texas state lawmakers on Sunday slammed law enforcement’s slow response to the shooting in Uvalde, where a gunman killed 19 children and two teachers, saying more decisive action could have saved lives.
A total of 376 officers -- border guards, state police, city police, local sheriff departments and elite forces -- responded to the May 24 massacre at Robb Elementary School, members of the southern U.S. state’s House of Representatives said in a preliminary report.
But, the lawmakers charged, the situation was “chaotic” due to the officers’ “lackadaisical approach” to subduing the gunman.
Seventy-three minutes elapsed between the first officers’ arrival and the shooter’s death, an “unacceptably long period of time.”
“The void of leadership could have contributed to the loss of life,” the report said.
While the report acknowledged it was likely that most of the victims died immediately after the first shots were fired, some died while being transferred to the hospital.
“It is plausible that some victims could have survived if they had not had to wait 73 additional minutes for rescue,” the report said.
According to the text, which does not incriminate certain police teams over others, law enforcement officers “failed to adhere to their active shooter training, and they failed to prioritize saving the lives of innocent victims over their own safety.”
Steve McCraw, Texas’s public safety chief, has previously described the police response to the attack as an “abject failure,” focusing most of his criticism on Uvalde school district police chief Pete Arredondo.