COPLEY, Ohio — A northeast Ohio man ran through his small-town neighborhood Sunday shooting eight people, including his girlfriend and her brother, before he was shot and killed in an exchange of gunfire with police, authorities said.
Eight people, including the gunman, were killed. Witnesses told reporters at least one of the victims was a child.
Police did not have a motive and did not release the names or ages of the gunman or the victims but provided a chronology of the shootings that began around 11 a.m. in a middle-class neighborhood of Copley, a town of about 14,000 west of Akron.
“A person running through the neighborhood and firing a gun” prompted calls to police, the Copley Police Department said in a news release Sunday.
At a home, the gunman shot his girlfriend, ran to a home next door and shot her brother and four others, then chased two people through some yards and shot one of them, police said.
He went into a third home and shot another person before leaving and exchanging gunfire with a police officer and a former police officer.
One of the man’s victims was taken to a hospital. The person’s condition was not known Sunday evening.
A neighbor, Gilbert Elie, said he was getting ready for church when he heard gunshots and cries for help in the wooded neighborhood.
He went to a house across the street and said he found a shocking scene: the woman who lived there lying in the driveway, her husband shot near the garage and their young granddaughter and another woman shot in the front seat of a vehicle, the windows apparently blown out by gunfire.
A third woman came out of the house next door and tried to talk to Elie, he said, but their brief exchange ended abruptly when a man followed her out of the house and shot her, sending the 75-year-old Elie running for safety behind a truck.
“She was talking to me, and he come up behind her and shot her, so I figured maybe I’m next,” he said.
He hid until he could see the gunman was gone, then returned home. Police arrived, and Elie said he heard a second round of shots coming from behind the houses and assumed officers had killed the gunman.
Elie described the gunman as unfriendly, a rarity on a street where most neighbors offer a wave in passing. He often worked on his car outside his house but never waved at anyone, Elie said.
The neighborhood remained blocked off by police late Sunday. About 200 people assembled at a park around sunset for an impromptu candlelight vigil for the shooting victims and for crime victims elsewhere.
