Active Shooting Last Night

There was an active shooting in my small Indiana town last night. Suspect is dead. The suspect fired hundreds of rounds from an automatic rifle. Over 200 police officers from several area law enforcement agencies responded.

Pictured above you can see the holes that were punched through the walls of the apartment from where the shooter was barricaded. Those openings were made by equipment deployed by SWAT teams. Law enforcement also made use of drones to see inside and a firehose to force an inside door open. People in the apartment building were safely evacuated.

Miraculously, with hundreds of rounds being fired over a period of several hours, no one was hurt. (The shooter’s being the only injury.) There was some exchange of gunfire between police and the shooter. It’s unclear at this point exactly what kind of injury resulted in the shooter’s death. Initial reports said that at about 6:05 this morning, the shooter was taken into an ambulance and died after that.

Some citizens in the area had live feeds on Facebook of what was transpiring. Interestingly to me, the visuals of the event were more informative than what local (Fort Wayne) televisions were able to air. As you can imagine, the accompanying narratives were (understandably) variable in quality. Years ago, when I worked in radio broadcast news, we didn’t live in a world where we could be “scooped” by someone with a cell phone camera.

For the professionals involved, it made for a long night. The initial shots were fired at about 6:30 last night. It ended about 12 hours later. The local school district closed for the day and there is damage caused by bullets to nearby buildings and cars.

Kendallville is a small northeast Indiana community of a little over 10-thousand people. Most of the time things have been generally quiet.