Three police officers were shot and killed and three others wounded Sunday morning in the southern U.S. city of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, after a masked gunman dressed in black opened fire with an assault rifle.
Hours later, authorities said the gunman was killed, and that a fourth officer, a deputy sheriff, was in critical condition at a local hospital after undergoing emergency surgery. Two other officers were undergoing hospital treatment for non-life threatening wounds.
Authorities offered no immediate evidence that police were targeted in the shootings and State Police Superintendent Col. Mike Edmonson later told reporters that investigators believe there was one shooter, later identified as 29-year-old Gavin Eugene Long. But Edmonson also warned that the investigation is ongoing “with a lot of moving parts,” and he did not rule out the possibility that the shooter had one or more accomplices who remain at large.
President Barack Obama, speaking on national television, condemned the killings, saying such attacks “are “happening far too often.” He called on Americans to “avoid divisive rhetoric” in the aftermath of the latest violence, which he earlier had described as “cowardly attacks on public servants, on the rule of law, and on civil society.”
Obama also noted that Sunday’s shootings, and other recent deadly violence involving police in Dallas, Texas, Baton Rouge and in Minnesota, come ahead of both Republican and Democratic nominating conventions set to begin in the coming days. He said that convention rhetoric “tends to get hotter than usual,” and urged candidates and their supporters to avoid “careless accusations” that could further heighten tensions.
Watch President Obama’s statement:
Click here for the text of an earlier written statement by President Obama.
Authorities offered no immediate evidence that police were targeted in the shootings. And State Police Superintendent Col. Mike Edmonson later told reporters that investigators believe there was one shooter. But he also warned that the investigation is ongoing “with a lot of moving parts,” and did not rule out the possibility that the shooter had one or more accomplices who remain at large.
Speaking alongside Edmonson, Governor John Bel Edwards sought to assure Baton Rouge residents still grappling with the July 5 police shooting of a black man that sparked widespread protests in major cities across the country.
Edwards did not address the earlier shooting death in his comments, instead focusing on Sunday’s violence, which he called an “absolutely unspeakable, heinous attack.” He also said the probe has the full cooperation of federal authorities, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.
Superintendent Edmonson said events began to unfold Sunday at 8:40 a.m., when an unidentified caller told police someone was carrying a rifle as he walked along a main roadway in the city. Nearby, as police approached the suspect a short while later, gunfire erupted behind a storefront, where authorities believe the officers and the gunman were shot.
WATCH: Video from the scene
Baton Rouge was the scene of a fatal police shooting of a black man July 5 that sparked widespread protests in major cities across the country.
The shooting death of Alton Sterling was partially recorded on a cell phone and widely circulated on social media.
Sterling’s death triggered intense protests that stretched for days in Baton Rouge. A day later, a Minnesota man was fatally shot during a traffic stop, and the following day five Dallas police officers were shot and killed by a heavily armed lone gunman. Before being killed by police, the Dallas shooter told police during a tense standoff that he was enraged by police killings.
Both Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton and Republican rival Donald Trump issued brief statements, with Clinton saying “there is no justification for violence, hate [or] for attacks on men and women who put their lives on the line every day.”
Trump, writing on Twitter, extended condolences to police and their families, and placed blame for the attack on a lack of leadership. He did not elaborate, but in a separate tweet wrote: “We demand law and order.”
A Look at Police Deaths
