Police in shootout after at least 14 killed in California attack

Hours after up to three gunmen stormed a service centre for people with disabilities, in San Bernardino, California on Wednesday, killing at least 14 people and wounding at least 17 others, officers engaged in a shootout with at least one suspect, according to police.

“There were shots fired, officers were involved, and a suspect is down,” a police spokeswoman, Sgt Vicki Cervantes, said. She said police officers were still surrounding the SUV and the person who was shot by the police, but it remained unclear if the suspect was related to the deadly shooting. She later confirmed one suspect was still at large while two were “being dealt with”.

Video footage from television helicopters circling overhead showed a bullet-riddled black SUV, similar to the one witnesses described seeing the suspect flee in earlier in the day.

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Earlier multiple gunmen – three, according to most witnesses – pulled up in a dark SUV at the complex of buildings occupied by Inland Regional Services, a service centre for people with disabilities, spent “several minutes” shooting inside one of the buildings, and then apparently fled, said Chief Jarrod Burguan of the San Bernardino police.

He alluded to reports that the men may have worn masks and body armour.

Victims

According to people who work at the facility, the shooting occurred inside a building that houses a conference centre that is often rented to other groups, and on Wednesday it was being used by the

San Bernardino County

Health Department.

Burguan said most of the victims were found in one part of that building, as if that had been the gunmen’s focus, but it was not clear whether they had specific victims in mind, or who they were.

The shooting took place about 11 am, and by late afternoon, the suspects were still at large, the subjects of a manhunt involving several law enforcement agencies.

The gunmen “were dressed and equipped in a way that indicate they were prepared, and they were armed with long guns, not handguns; I do not know what type of long guns,” Burguan said at a news conference about three hours after the shooting. “They came prepared to do what they did, as if they were on a mission.”

The first reports of gunfire came at about 11am, and the offices of Inland Regional Centre were soon surrounded by officers from several local law enforcement and emergency medical agencies. Amid reports of a possible explosive devicein the building, teams of officers searched it room by room, looking for survivors or suspects.

Pursuit

The FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives also dispatched agents. But radio traffic among police officers indicated that the gunmen may have left before police arrived, and there were reports of a pursuit.

Ambulance crews treated wounded people in the middle of Waterman Avenue, a major north-south street through this city of more than 200,000 about an hour’s drive east of Los Angeles.

The radio traffic conveyed a chaotic and tense situation, as officers guided civilians from the building and described graphic scenes as they passed victims inside.

The attack came just five days after a gunman killed three people and wounded nine others at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs – the latest in a long string of mass shootings that have rocked the US and prompted debates about the easy availability of firearms.

President Barack Obama, who has lamented previous mass shootings, in increasingly emotional terms, was monitoring the situation. “We have a pattern now of mass shootings in this country which has no parallel anywhere in the world,” he said.

New York Times