UPS shooting leaves 4, including gunman, dead in San Francisco

SAN FRANCISCO — A UPS driver armed with a handgun opened fire at a United Parcel Service Inc. package-sorting center in San Francisco on Wednesday, killing three people before fatally shooting himself as officers closed in.

The victims, like the gunman, were also company drivers, said Steve Gaut, head of investor relations at UPS. The man opened fire while the workers were gathered for their daily morning meeting before they were due to head out on their delivery routes, he added.

Two other people were taken to an area hospital with gunshot wounds, San Francisco police said. Authorities did not immediately identify the gunman or the victims.

Police offered no explanation as to a possible motive for the shooting. But Assistant Police Chief Toney Chaplin told a news conference the shooting was not an act of terrorism.

Police recovered two firearms from the UPS facility, including the murder weapon, which they described as an “assault pistol.”

The UPS facility, which employs about 350 workers in the city’s Potrero Hill area, was initially placed under a security lockdown as a precaution.

The gun violence there erupted hours after another, unrelated mass shooting at a charity baseball practice in the suburbs of the nation’s capital left a congressman and several others wounded before the assailant was killed by police.

“We are always saddened by the loss of life to gun violence. Any shooting is one shooting too many,” San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee said on Twitter.

Gaut said the facility’s employees were dismissed from work once the lockdown was lifted and that most had since left the building. The company is providing trauma and grief counseling.

Video footage from the scene showed a massive police presence near the facility, with workers being escorted outside and embracing one another on the sidewalk.

“Our thoughts and prayers are with all those touched by this incident,” UPS said in a statement. A similar statement of condolence was issued by James Hoffa, president of the Teamsters union that represents UPS workers.

The San Francisco bloodshed came three years after a UPS employee shot and killed two of his supervisors before turning the gun on himself at a UPS distribution center in Birmingham, Alabama. That gunman had recently been fired from the facility.

The deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history occurred in June 2016 when a gunman claiming allegiance to the Islamic State militant group killed 49 people at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida.

Gun laws in the United States rank among the most permissive of any developed country, with the right to “keep and bear arms” enshrined in the Constitution’s Second Amendment. Efforts to tighten national gun control measures failed after mass shootings at an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut, in 2012 and the nightclub shooting in Orlando.

source: interaksyon.com

Official: 27 dead in Conn. school shooting

A gunman opened fire inside a Connecticut elementary school Friday, killing 26 people, including 18 children, and forcing students to cower in classrooms and then flee with the help of teachers and police.

The death toll was given to The Associated Press by an official who spoke on condition of anonymity because the investigation was still under way.

The shooting appeared to be the nation's second-deadliest school shooting, exceeded only by the Virginia Tech massacre in 2007.

Parents flooded to Sandy Hook Elementary School, about 60 miles northeast of New York City, looking for their children in the wake of the shooting. Students were told to close their eyes by police as they were led from the building.

A photo taken by The Newtown Bee newspaper showed a group of young students _ some crying, others looking visibly frightened _ being escorted by adults through a parking lot in a line, hands on each other's shoulders.

Students and staff were among the victims, state police Lt. Paul Vance said a brief news conference. He also said the gunman was dead inside the school, but he refused to say how people were killed.

Another official, speaking on condition of anonymity because the investigation was still under way, said the gunman apparently had two guns.

A law enforcement official in Washington said the attacker was a 20-year-old man with ties to the school and that one of the guns was a .223-caliber rifle. The official also said that police were searching a location in New Jersey in connection with the shootings. That official spoke on the condition of anonymity because the source was not authorized to speak on the record about the developing criminal investigation.

Robert Licata said his 6-year-old son was in class when the gunman burst in and shot the teacher.

"That's when my son grabbed a bunch of his friends and ran out the door," he said. "He was very brave. He waited for his friends."

He said the shooter didn't say a word.

Stephen Delgiadice said his 8-year-old daughter heard two big bangs and teachers told her to get in a corner. His daughter was fine.

"It's alarming, especially in Newtown, Connecticut, which we always thought was the safest place in America," he said.

A dispatcher at the Newtown Volunteer Ambulance Corps said a teacher had been shot in the foot and taken to Danbury Hospital. Andrea Rynn, a spokeswoman at the hospital, said it had three patients from the school but she did not have information on the extent or nature of their injuries.

Mergim Bajraliu, 17, heard the gunshots echo from his home and raced to check on his 9-year-old sister at the school. He said his sister, who was fine, heard a scream come over the intercom at one point. He said teachers were shaking and crying as they came out of the building.

"Everyone was just traumatized," he said.

Richard Wilford's 7-year-old son, Richie, is in the second grade at the school. His son told him that he heard a noise that "sounded like what he described as cans falling."

The boy told him a teacher went out to check on the noise, came back in, locked the door and had the kids huddle up in the corner until police arrived.

"There's no words," Wilford said. "It's sheer terror, a sense of imminent danger, to get to your child and be there to protect him."

Melissa Makris, 43, said her 10-year-old son, Philip, was in the school gym.

"He said he heard a lot of loud noises and then screaming. Then the gym teachers immediately gathered the children in a corner and kept them safe in a corner," Makris said.

The fourth-grader told his mother that the students stayed huddled until police came in the gym. He also told her that he saw what looked like a body under a blanket as he fled the school.

"He said the policeman came in and helped them get out of the building and told them to run," Makris said. "And they ran to the firehouse."

The White House said Barack Obama was notified of the shooting and his spokesman Jay Carney said the president had "enormous sympathy for families that are affected."

source: thetandd.com