The shooter, a painter, opened fire at a lawnmower factory before being killed by the first cop to reach the spot
Los Angeles: A gunman killed three people and wounded 14 others at a lawnmower factory in Kansas yesterday before being gunned down by police in the latest mass shooting to rock the United States, according to a police official.
Cedric Ford. Pic/Facebook
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Harvey County Sheriff T Walton said the gunman was an employee at Excel Industries, located in Hesston, a tight-knit community north of Wichita.
Walton said the first officer to arrive at the scene shot the gunman. “This is a horrible situation, just terrible,” Walton said, adding that his department received a congratulatory call from the White House after the incident.
He said authorities had information on “some things that triggered this individual”, but he would not elaborate. The carnage was the latest in a string of mass shootings in the United States, where such attacks have become commonplace.
Local media identified the gunman as Cedric Ford (38), who worked as a painter at the factory and had posted a picture of himself on Facebook with an assault rifle. Matt Jarrell, a painter at Excel, said that “never in a million years” would he have expected Ford to do something like this before he saw him open fire. “He was a mellow guy,” Jarrell said. “He was somebody I could talk to about anything.”
Ford recently moved to the area from Miami, and had an extensive criminal record. The victims were taken to local hospitals, where five were deemed to be in critical condition.
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