Shooting rampage in California leaves 14 dead, 17 wounded
Gunmen opened fire on a holiday party on December 2 at a social services agency in San Bernardino, California, killing 14 people and wounding 17 others, then fled the scene, triggering an intense manhunt and a shootout with police, authorities said.
One suspect was struck by gunfire and one officer was injured in a confrontation hours after the mass shooting, San Bernardino police spokeswoman Sergeant Vicki Cervantes told reporters, adding that a second suspect might still be "outstanding."
She did not know the condition of the struck suspect but said the officer's injuries were not considered to be life-threatening.
San Bernardino Police Chief Jarrod Burguan said in a televised news briefing earlier that as many as three suspects were believed to have made their getaway in a dark-colored sport utility vehicle. A vehicle matching that description turned up at the shootout with police several hours later, Cervantes.
The police chief said 14 people were killed and 14 others wounded in the initial shooting spree, which unfolded at 11 a.m. on the campus of the Inland Regional Center, an agency that serves the developmentally disabled.
Cervantes later revised the toll of wounded to 17, not including the suspect and police officer who were shot later.
The shooting rampage in San Bernardino, about 60 miles (100 km) east of Los Angeles, marked the deadliest US gun violence since the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, in December 2012, in which 27 people, including the gunman, were killed.
As the suspects fled, authorities ordered a security "lockdown" of all local schools, as well as city and county buildings, and area hospitals were placed on alert, Burguan said. Police searched door to door in the Redlands neighborhood a few miles from the site of the attack.
So far in 2015, there have been more than 350 shootings in which four or more people were wounded, according to the crowd-sourced website shootingtracker.com, which keeps a running tally of U.S. gun violence.
The shooting in California comes less than a week after a gunman killed three people and wounded nine in a shooting rampage at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs, Colorado. In October, a gunman killed nine people at a college in Oregon, and in June, a white gunman killed nine black churchgoers in South Carolina.