COPLEY – A gunman shot and killed seven people Sunday, including an 11 year-old child, before police shot him dead in a small town in Ohio, police and local media report.
The rampage — which was apparently rooted in a domestic dispute — left bodies strewn across an otherwise quiet street in Copley Township beginning at about 11 am (1500 GMT) Sunday morning.
Gilbert Elie came outside at the sound of the shots and moaning to discover the bloodied bodies of two of his neighbors — a woman and her husband — lying in their driveway.
He went to check on them and saw a woman lying over a teenaged girl — as if to protect her — inside a black minivan. They both looked dead and Elie called to his wife to call the police.
Then another neighbor came outside and asked him what was going on.
“I was talking to her when her boyfriend came out of the house behind her and shot her three or four times,” he told the Akron Beacon Herald.
Elie jumped behind a car and when he peeked out from behind it, he saw the woman “fall off the porch and down the steps.”
He then heard the welcome sound of police sirens, along with more shots and the sound of people running behind the houses through the nearby woods.
Police arriving at the scene spotted the gunman fleeing and took chase.
The suspect then “engaged the officers in gunfire and the suspect has been killed as well,” Copley Police Chief Michael Mier told the paper.
“Our job is extremely complicated right now because we have four scenes that we’re processing,” he later told reporters.
“We understand that at some point in time the shooter was chasing somebody.”
Mier said the toll could rise as high as nine because another badly wounded victim was taken to hospital.
Five of the victims — whom neighbors said were all part of one family — were found at one home on Schocalog Road, WEWS news reported. A sixth was found in a different home on the same street.
The seventh victim was found in a home on Goodenough Avenue and an eighth victim was found somewhere between those locations.
Copley Township, located some 50 miles (80 kilometers) south of Cleveland, has a population of some 14,000, according to the Township’s website.