By Brendan O’Brien
(Reuters) – Police in Oregon were trying to determine on Monday what led a gunman to go on a shooting spree with an AR-15-style rifle hours earlier in a shopping center parking lot and then inside a grocery store, killing two people before he was found dead.
Police in Bend, Oregon, responded to calls of an active shooter at 7 p.m. local time on Sunday at the Forum Shopping Center, the city’s police chief Mike Krantz said during a late-night news conference.
A gunman had opened fire in the center’s parking lot before he entered the grocery store and shot a person he immediately encountered. That person was taken to a hospital and later died, Krantz said.
“The shooter continued through Safeway firing rounds,” he said, noting that another person was killed inside the store. “Officers responded and when they arrived they entered the Safeway immediately, still hearing shots.”
Police officers found the shooter dead with an AR-15-style rifle nearby, he said, noting that police did not open fire.
One person was also injured in the shooting, but their condition was unknown, Krantz said.
He did not disclose the identities of the shooter or the victims.
The shooting in Bend, a community of 100,000 people 160 miles (258 km) southeast of Portland, comes after a string of mass shootings in the United States over the last several months.
On May 14, 10 people were killed in a shooting at a grocery store in Buffalo, New York. Ten days later, a massacre at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, left 19 children and two teachers dead.
(Reporting by Brendan O’Brien in Chicago; Editing by Mark Porter)
