Three people were killed and 10 others were wounded – including at least two law enforcement officers – when a shooter opened fire on Friday at a grocery store in Arkansas, police said.
The shooting occurred on Friday morning at the Mad Butcher grocery store in Fordyce. The suspected shooter was critically injured after being shot by police, Arkansas state police said. The wounded officers did not have life-threatening injuries.
Police did not immediately say whether the shooting occurred inside or outside the store. Authorities planned to hold a news briefing on the shooting later on Friday afternoon.
Fordyce is a city of about 3,200 people located 65 miles (104km) south of the state capital of Little Rock.
Video posted on social media showed at least one person lying in the parking lot, while another video captured the sound of multiple gunshots ringing out.
Images from TV reporters on the scene showed a slew of bullet holes in the grocery store’s window. In video footage, local and state agencies could be seen responding to the scene, with at least one medical helicopter landing nearby.
Arkansas’s governor, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, said she had been briefed on the shooting. In a statement posted on the social media platform X, the governor thanked police and first responders “for their quick and heroic action to save lives”, and she offered prayers to “the victims and all those [affected] by this”.
It is the latest mass shooting involving a grocery store. A white supremacist in 2022 killed 10 Black people at a Buffalo supermarket; that incident came a little more than a year after a shooting at a Boulder, Colorado, supermarket, where 10 people were killed.
There had been at least 234 mass shootings in the US so far this year as of Friday – an average of more than one daily, according to the Gun Violence Archive.
The non-partisan online resource defines a mass shooting as one in which four or more victims are wounded or killed.
Such a high rate of mass shootings in the US has driven some in the country to call for more substantial, meaningful gun control. But the federal government has mostly been unable or unwilling to heed those calls.
David Rodriguez, 58, had stopped at his 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 little pops,” he said to 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 gunfire escalated.
“The police started to show up, and then there was massive gunfire and ambulances pulling up,” he said. “The bullets were just flying.”
The Associated Press contributed reporting
