WASHINGTON (Dispatches) -- A man went on a rampage at a Texas outlet mall on Saturday, shooting dead eight people and wounding several others before he was killed by a police officer at the busy shopping complex.
Video footage circulating online showed the shooter getting out of a sedan in the mall’s parking lot before opening fire on people walking nearby.
An officer inside on an unrelated call quickly responded to the gunfire and “neutralized” the shooter as scenes of panic broke out at the sprawling facility in Allen, police said.
The identity of the shooter was not released. His body, sprawled on a sidewalk, was one of seven deaths at the mall when more police arrived.
Two others died in the hospital while “three are in critical surgery, and four are stable,” said Allen fire chief Jonathan Boyd.
The shooting at Allen Premium Outlets, 35 miles (55 kilometers) north of Dallas, began around 3:30 pm (2030 GMT), when it was busy with weekend shoppers, police said. Allen, Texas, is a community of about 100,000 people.
The officer in the mall “heard gunshots, went to the gunshots, engaged the suspect and neutralized the suspect,” said chief Brian Harvey of the Allen police department. Allen, Texas, is a community of about 100,000 people.
Some of the victims were as young as five years old, a hospital official told NBC News.
One unidentified eyewitness told local ABC affiliate WFAA TV that the gunman was “walking down the sidewalk just ... shooting his gun outside,” and that “he was just shooting his gun everywhere for the most part.”
Blood could be seen on sidewalks outside the mall and white sheets covering what appeared to be bodies.
Texas Governor Greg Abbott called the mass shooting an “unspeakable tragedy.”
Authorities believed initially that a second shooter might be on
the loose. As police combed through stores in the mall, frantic shoppers and store employees rushed into parking lots.
Harvey later said police believe the unidentified shooter, who CNN said was wearing tactical gear, “acted alone.”
Janet St. James, a spokesperson for Medical City Healthcare, which operates multiple trauma facilities in North Texas, said it received eight patients from the shooting, ranging in age from five to 61, NBC News reported.
Jaynal Pervez, who arrived at the mall while his daughter was inside, told CNN: “There’s no more safe places. I don’t know what to do.”
Pervez later told broadcaster CBS that the scenes in the mall parking lot had been chaotic. “I saw the shoes around there, people’s cell phones on the street,” he said.
Separately, police in the nearby city of Frisco, Texas, said they had evacuated the Stonebriar mall late Saturday after receiving reports of shots fired there. It was not yet clear if a shooting had actually taken place.
With more firearms than inhabitants, the United States has the highest rate of gun deaths of any developed country -- 49,000 in 2021, up from 45,000 the year before.
Mass shootings are happening with staggering frequency in the United States this year: an average of about one a week, according to a database maintained by The Associated Press and USA Today in partnership with Northeastern University.
At least 198 mass shootings have occurred so far in 2023, the most at this point in the year since at least 2016, according to the Gun Violence Archive. The nonprofit group defines a mass shooting as any in which four or more people are wounded or killed, not including the shooter.