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Two people were killed and eight others were wounded — including a law enforcement officer — when a gunman opened fire Friday at a grocery store in Arkansasthe police said.
The shooting happened at the Mad Butcher grocery store in Fordyce. The suspected shooter was critically injured after being shot by police, Arkansas state police said. The injured police officer is not in danger of life.
Police did not immediately say whether the shooting happened inside or outside the store. Authorities planned to hold a briefing about the shooting later Friday afternoon.
Fordyce is a city of about 3,200 people located 65 miles (104 km) south of the state capital of Little Rock.
A video posted on social media shows at least one person lying in the parking lot, while another video captures the sound of multiple gunshots.
Images from television reporters on the scene showed multiple bullet holes in the grocery store’s window. Video footage shows local and state agencies responding to the scene, with at least one medical helicopter landing nearby.
Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders said she had been informed of the shooting. In a statement posted on social media platform X, the governor thanked police and first responders “for their swift and heroic actions to save lives” and offered prayers for “the victims and all those [affected] with this”.
This is the latest mass shooting at a grocery store. A white racist in 2022 killed 10 black people in a supermarket in Buffalo; that incident came just over a year after a shooting at a Boulder, Colorado supermarket that killed 10 people.
There had been at least 234 mass shootings in the U.S. so far this year as of Friday — an average of more than one a day, according to Gun Violence Archive.
The nonpartisan online resource defines a mass shooting as one in which four or more victims are injured or killed.
Such a high rate of mass shootings in the US has led some in the country to call for more substantial, meaningful gun control. But the federal government was mostly unable or unwilling to heed these calls.
David Rodriguez, 58, stopped at a local gas station in Fordyce to fill up his car when he heard what he thought were fireworks from a nearby vendor’s stand.
“We heard a few light pops,” he told The Associated Press.
He then saw people running from the Mad Butcher grocery store into the parking lot and one person lying on the ground. He began recording video with his phone before the shooting escalated.
“The police started showing up and then there was massive shooting and ambulances arrived,” he said. “The bullets were just flying.”
The Associated Press contributed to this report
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