SANTA MONICA, CALIF, June 8: A gunman dressed in black killed four people in a string of shootings through the seaside California town of Santa Monica before he was shot dead by police in a community college library, law enforcement officials said.
Five other people were wounded, one of them critically, in the yesterday shooting rampage that unfolded just a few miles from where President Barack Obama was speaking at a political fundraiser elsewhere in Santa Monica, west of Los Angeles.
As the gunman lay dead on a sidewalk outside the Santa Monica College library, a second individual was taken into custody near the campus and described by police as a “person of interest” in the case. He was later released.
Police initially said six people were killed by the gunman.
Obama completed his remarks at his event without interruption and left for a summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping near the desert resort community of Palm Springs. The bloodshed did not appear to be related to Obama’s visit and the Secret Service called it a “local police matter.”
The killing spree marked the latest in string of high-profile mass shootings over the past year, including a December attack in Connecticut that killed 20 children and six adults at an elementary school and a shooting last July at a suburban Denver movie theater that killed 12 people.
Those attacks have helped re-ignite a national debate over gun violence in America that spurred Obama and his fellow Democrats to push for expanded background checks for gun buyers – an initiative defeated in the U.S. Senate.
Santa Monica Police Chief Jacqueline Seabrooks said the shooting rampage began east of the college campus shortly before noon when police received multiple reports of a house fire, a carjacking and shootings in the area.
Police traded gunfire with the gunman outside the college and pursued him into a library, where he was shot and killed, Seabrooks said.
(agencies)
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