Gunman kills 1, then himself at Nevada medical building

[December 18, 2013]  By Alex Dobuzinskis and Tim Gaynor

(Reuters) — A man opened fire on Tuesday in a Reno, Nevada, medical building, killing one person and injuring two others before he died of an apparently self-inflicted gunshot wound, police said.

The shooting, the latest in a rash of deadly U.S. gun violence at public venues in the United States this year, occurred shortly after 2 p.m. at the building adjacent to the Renown Regional Medical Center, Reno Deputy Police Chief Tom Robinson said.

He told a news conference that no shots were fired by law enforcement officers during the incident, and that the building had been declared "secure and safe."

A lockdown of the overall medical center was lifted after the crime scene was secured, Robinson said.

He said two people died in the shooting, including the gunman, who apparently took his own life with his weapon, and two others were hurt and were "seeking treatment now at a local hospital."

The bodies of the gunman and victim were found on the third floor of the medical building during a room-to-room sweep of the interior, Robinson said. Neither was immediately identified.

"We are still in the middle of processing the crime scene, and we don't want to compromise it by just rushing up to try to identify who the deceased people are," he told reporters, adding that investigators were interviewing some two dozen witnesses to the crime.

He gave no further details on the shooter, any possible motive, the type of weapon used, the conditions of the surviving victims or the nature of their injuries.

The Reno-Gazette-Journal posted on its website video footage taken by an eyewitness of a long line of police officers running into the building in response to the shooting.

The Center for Advanced Medicine B, where the shooting took place, is located in an office building across a road from the main hospital campus. It is one of two facilities in the complex that house medical practices from dozens of medical specialties, according to the hospital's website.

Nevada Governor Brian Sandoval issued a brief statement via Twitter saying he and his wife "send our thoughts and prayers to those affected by today's tragedy."

The shooting in Reno, which lies in northwestern Nevada and is the most populous city in the state outside the Las Vegas metropolitan area, came four days after a Colorado teenager armed with a shotgun critically wounded a classmate and committed suicide at a suburban Denver high school.

(Reporting by Alex Dobuzinskis in Los Angeles and Tim Gaynor in Phoenix; writing by Steve Gorman; editing by Gunna Dickson, Bernard Orr and Eric Beech)

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