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INDIANAPOLIS — At least eight people were killed in a shooting at a FedEx facility in Indianapolis late Thursday, and the gunman was believed to have killed himself, the police said.
Officer Genae Cook of the Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department told reporters Friday morning that multiple people with injuries, including one in critical condition, had been taken to hospitals in the area. She said employees at the facility were still being interviewed by detectives and may not have had the chance to contact their families.
Officer Cook said the police were working to identify the gunman and that no law enforcement officers had been injured.
“This is going to go long into the morning,” she added.
Earlier, Officer Cook had asked people who had been unable to reach family members who worked at the facility to gather at a nearby Holiday Inn Express, adding that representatives of the chaplain’s office of the police department would be there to assist them.
At about 2:45 a.m. on Friday, before the deaths were announced, the mood was anxious at the hotel as more than 100 people waited for news. Family members said FedEx employees are not allowed to use their phones on the floor of the facility and hoped that was why had not heard from their loved ones.
One of the people in the hotel lobby, Christina Valor, said she had learned about the shooting from news reports and driven to the hotel because she had not been able to reach one of her husband’s sisters who worked there.
“We’re hoping for the best,” Ms. Valor said. “But we don’t know anything.”
The FedEx facility where the shooting occurred is on the city’s southwest side, near the airport.
Jim Masilak, a FedEx spokesman, said on Friday that the company was cooperating with authorities. “We are deeply shocked and saddened by the loss of our team members following the tragic shooting at our FedEx Ground facility in Indianapolis,” he said. “Our most heartfelt sympathies are with all those affected by this senseless act of violence.”
Officer Cook told reporters that the police arrived at the scene just after 11 p.m., responding to a report that shots had been fired. They encountered an “active shooter incident,” she said.
Representative André Carson, Democrat of Indiana, said on Twitter early Friday that he was heartbroken and praying for those affected. “I am communicating with local authorities to get all details of the attack and my office stands ready to help everyone affected any way we can,” he wrote.
INDIANAPOLIS — Dozens of families gathered in a conference room at a Holiday Inn Express & Suites early Friday, where they waited for information about their loved ones after a mass shooting at the FedEx Ground facility near Indianapolis International Airport.
At least eight people were killed, the authorities said.
Family members said FedEx employees were not allowed to use their phones on the floor of the facility. They hoped — in some cases, prayed — that was why they had not heard from their loved ones.
One of the people at the hotel, Pardeep Sidhu of Plainfield, Ind., said his aunt and uncle worked at the facility and that a friend’s 45-year-old husband had been shot there.
Patricia Holman, the senior chaplain for the Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department, was one of six chaplains who arrived at the hotel on Friday to provide counseling and comfort. She has been with the city for more than 30 years, first as a police officer, then as a chaplain.
“This isn’t the first time six of us have responded to an event,” she said. “But this is the first time six of us have been necessary.”
“It never gets easier,” she added.
She said they would try to give the affected families as much information as possible about what would happen next, including an autopsy, if they had to deliver the news that a loved one had been killed.
“It’s as difficult for us to tell it as it is for them to hear it,” she said. “This happens far too often.”
A reporter with WRTV, an Indianapolis station, posted an interview on Twitter with a man who said he had been at the FedEx facility when the shooting broke out and later saw a body on the floor.
WISH, another local station, quoted an employee at the warehouse, Jeremiah Miller, as saying that he had heard up to 10 shots after finishing his shift.
“This made me stand up and actually look out the entrance door, and I saw a man with a submachine gun of some sort, an automatic rifle, and he was firing in the open,” Mr. Miller told the station. “I immediately ducked down and got scared and my friend’s mother, she came in and told us to get inside the car.”
Courtney Crown, a reporter with a Fox News affiliate in Indianapolis, posted another interview with a man who said his niece had been hospitalized after being shot in the left arm when the shooting broke out.
The attack in Indianapolis on Thursday came after a spate of mass shootings across the United States in recent weeks:
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In mid-March, eight people were shot to death at three massage parlors in the Atlanta area, raising fears that the crimes may have targeted people of Asian descent.
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Less than a week later, 10 people were killed when a gunman opened fire at a grocery store in Boulder, Colo.
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At the end of March, a gunman killed four people, including a 9-year-old boy, at a real estate office in Southern California.
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Last week, a neighbor shot and killed a doctor, the doctor’s wife and their two grandchildren inside their house in Rock Hill, S.C., as well as an air-conditioning technician who was working outside the home. A sixth person who was shot later died.
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