Kansas gunman kills 3, injures 14, before being fatally shot by police in workplace rampage

A gunman in Kansas opened fire at multiple locations, including his workplace, killing three people and injuring 14 others Thursday before he was shot and killed by authorities, police said.

“Everybody says it can’t happen here, but…it happened here,” Harvey County Sheriff T. Walton said at a news conference on Thursday night. “This is a fairly peaceful community. And to have something like this is tragic.”

While Walton said he could not confirm a motive or identify the gunman, he did say authorities did not believe the shooting was related to terrorism.

“We have an idea … there were some things that triggered this particular individual,” Walton said.

It was the 49th mass shooting in the U.S. this year, according to the crowd-sourced Mass Shooting Tracker database, and came just five days after agunman killed six people while driving around Kalamazoo, Mich. in an apparently random rampage.

Most of the bloodshed in Kansas Thursday night took place at Excel Industries, a company that manufactures lawn-mowing equipment. Walton said the gunman worked at the Excel plant in Hesston, about 35 miles north of Wichita, but he could not say if the man had recently been fired or how long he had worked there.

Walton said the shooter shot 15 people at Excel, killing three, before he was fatally shot by a law enforcement official. Two other people were shot and injured by the gunman as he drove toward the plant.

“This is a horrible situation,” Walton said. “Just terrible, terrible.”

A law enforcement officer responding to the shooting — the first to arrive on the scene — shot and killed the gunman, saving other lives, Walton said. The gunman was armed with an “assault type” long gun and a pistol, he added.

“[The officer] went inside of that place and saved multiple, multiple lives,” Walton said. “He’s a hero as far as I’m concerned.”

Walton said local officials received a call from the White House on Thursday.

On Thursday evening, police traveled to the shooter’s home, where a man he apparently lived with refused to let officers inside, Walton said.

That standoff ended late Thursday night, when law enforcement surrounded a mobile home in Newton — about a dozen miles south of the Excel plant — that was believed to belong to the shooter, KWCH reported.

Newton police told the local television station that they’d received tips there was someone in the home and heard music coming from inside. But the music eventually stopped, and police ultimately found the home empty.

They would not say what was found inside, KWCH said.

Before the report of an active shooter at Excel, though, police received multiple reports of shooting victims elsewhere. The first call came in at 5 p.m. about a man in nearby Newton who was shot in the shoulder while in his truck, police said. That was followed by a report of a person in a different place shot in the leg.

Edna Bartel Decker, a Hesston resident, said she was one of the people shot at by the gunman on the road. In a message to The Washington Post, she said she was in her car driving home when he drove past her, then slammed his breaks and jumped out of his car toting a gun.

“I was blocked and couldn’t go around,” she wrote. “He motioned me to get out, I refused, so he lifted up the gun to shoot. I immediately laid down on the seat as he shot. It went through my driver window and exited out to back passenger window.”

“I give all the praise to God for my protection!” she added.

First responders gather a staging area by Excel Industries in Hesston, Kan. (Fernando Salazar/The Wichita Eagle via AP)

Shortly after the reports of the shootings on the road, police were called about a shooting in Excel’s parking lot and then alerted to an active shooter at the facility.

Walton said that the gunman got out of his car and shot at two other vehicles during the earlier shooting reports. The gunman then got into one of these vehicles and drove toward Excel, firing as he drove, before arriving at the facility and opening fire, Walton said. At the time, about 150 people were working in the plant which employs about 1,000 workers.

“There’s so many crime scenes and there’s so many people,” he said at an earlier news conference. He added: “This is just a horrible incident that happened here.”

Austin McCaskill, who works on motor hydraulics at Excel, said he had come back from his first break when he heard the gunshots.

“I was just working and I heard this pop, pop, pop,” McCaskill, 40, said in a telephone interview. “You don’t hear that sound very often. I kept working and all of a sudden one of the bullets came flying over our heads and hit one of the frames, so we all just took off running.”

McCaskill said he did not know the gunman personally, but he had seen him around. Other people who worked at the plant said the gunman “was having problems, like his girlfriend broke up with him,” McCaskill said. “He was having a bunch of problems but you don’t need to go blasting up a plant because you’ve got problems.”

Police vehicles near one of the shooting scenes Thursday. (KWCH-TV via AP)

The gunman was “running through the plant just going crazy with a gun … just randomly shooting people,” McCaskill said. After running outside with others, McCaskill said they saw “probably two or three people laying in the road.”

“One guy got shot in the back,” he said. “There was one guy who was shot in the leg. There were random people everywhere who had gunshot wounds.”

A helicopter came to transport at least some of the injured to a hospital, McCaskill said.

John Burnett, another Excel employee, said he was working on the assembly line when he heard a cluster of pops.

“We thought it was maybe the paint line or maybe a part fell,” he said. “And then it happened again real quick, and then again right after that.”

When Burnett saw co-workers running towards the plant’s backdoor, he sprinted after them. As he ran towards the exit, however, he stopped to help an injured co-worker who was clutching his back in pain.

“I could tell there was blood,” Burnett said. “He was a painter, so he was wearing a paint suit, and they are white, and I noticed there was red all over his paint suit.”

Burnett helped the injured man outside, where others worked to stop the bleeding and called 911. Burnett said he was friendly with the alleged shooter, but did not know him well or speak to him outside of work.

“He always seemed like a fairly decent guy,” Burnett said. “He always had a smile on his face. He never seemed like anything bothered him.”

Police guard the front door of Excel Industries in Hesston, Kan., Thursday, Feb. 25, 2016, where a gunman killed 3 people and injured 14. (Fernando Salazar/The Wichita Eagle via AP)

Six people injured in the shooting were in stable condition and being treated at Wesley Medical Center in Wichita, a hospital spokeswoman said. Another seven patients — five in serious condition, two in fair condition — were taken to Via Christi Hospital – St Francis in Wichita, a spokeswoman said. Four people were taken to Newton Medical Center, a spokeswoman there said, three in good condition and one in fair condition.

In the aftermath of the shooting, live feeds from local media networks showed people gathered in the area amid flashing lights from police cars. One emotional moment — a husband and wife reuniting — was captured by a news camera: