At least three people are dead and several others, including two police officers, were injured Monday in a northwestern New Mexico community before authorities shot and killed the 18-year-old suspect, police said.
The shootings occurred around 11 a.m. in Farmington, New Mexico, a city of more than 45,000 people that serves as a modern-day trading post to the adjacent Navajo Nation reservation and is a supply line and bedroom community to the region’s oil and natural gas industry.
Officers responding to several calls about a shooting found “a chaotic scene” where a man was firing at people on a residential street, Farmington Police Deputy Chief Baric Crum said during a news conference.
Police confronted the suspected shooter before fatally shooting him. They found three people dead.
“Besides the suspect himself, who is deceased, there were nine other people injured,” Crum said, adding that police were trying to determine why he was in the neighborhood. He did not identify the suspect and said he didn’t know the ages of any of the victims.
Officers from the Farmington Police Department, San Juan County Sheriff’s Office, and the New Mexico State Police were investigating the shooting. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives tweeted that agents from Phoenix were responding to Farmington to assist in the investigation.
The shooting led to “preventative lockdowns” of the Farmington Municipal Schools at the request of police, the school district said. The lockdowns were lifted Monday afternoon.
Authorities are asking for anyone with information to come forward.
“What we now need from our community is anybody that has any additional information, whether that be eyewitness information or video information or whatever it may be, if you feel it’s pertinent,” Crum said.
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‘You never think it’s going to happen here’
Hank Shirley who lives near the scene of the shooting, said he was home watching television when he heard a series of gunshots around 11 a.m. which he described as a prolonged gun battle. Shirley said he did not see what happened but rather identified the distinctive pops as gunfire.
“When I heard that, I told my daughter to get down in the basement and get the baby down in the basement,” Shirley told the Farmington Daily Times, part of the USA TODAY Network.
About four minutes after the gunfire ceased, he said he heard sirens and saw emergency vehicles approaching.
Middle school teacher Nick Akins, whose home is on a street near the crime scene that police locked down, described the neighborhood as a mostly a great place to live, with a mix of family homes, short-term rental apartments, and churches. Seeing Farmington in the national spotlight for yet another mass shooting, particularly one that occurred on his street, was surreal for him.
“You never think it’s going to happen here and all of a sudden, in a tiny little town it comes here,” Akins said. “It’s not like the roughest area in town but it can be. We have great neighbors and rentals, people who come and go. We don’t always know everyone.”
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Another U.S. mass shooting
Monday’s incident in New Mexico is the 224th mass shooting in the U.S. so far this year, according to the Gun Violence Archive, which defines a mass shooting as an incident in which four or more people are shot or killed, not including the shooter.
New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham said in a statement that she was praying for the families of the victims and that the incident “serves at yet another reminder of how gun violence destroys lives in our state and our country every single day.” Lujan Grisham, a Democrat, did not describe any other circumstances of the deadly confrontation.
Contributing: Mike Easterling and Jessica Onsurez, Farmington Daily Times; The Associated Press
