A gunman opened fire inside a grocery store in Collierville, Tenn., on Thursday, killing one person and injuring at least 12 people before he shot and killed himself, the authorities said.
The authorities said they had received a report of a shooting at 1:30 p.m. inside a Kroger store in Collierville, about 30 miles east of Memphis.
The first police car arrived at 1:34 p.m., and officers flooded the area and went from aisle to aisle and room to room, helping injured victims and escorting employees out of hiding. Some had hidden in freezers and locked offices, Dale Lane, the Collierville police chief, said at a news conference.
He said the attacker had died and was believed to have been killed by a self-inflicted gunshot wound. The gunman’s vehicle was still in the parking lot, he said.
Chief Lane declined to say if the attacker had been an employee at the store, saying it was part of the investigation. He said the injuries to the victims were “very serious.”
The shooting was “the most horrific event that has occurred in Collierville history,” he said.
Glenda McDonald, a Kroger employee, told Fox 13, a local TV station, that she was inside the store when she heard a gunshot that sounded like it was coming from the deli. She said she ran out the front door.
“Several people did get shot — some customers and employees,” she told the station, adding that she did not know what the attacker looked like. “The only thing I heard was the gunshots.”
Brignetta Dickerson, who said she had worked at the Kroger for 32 years, told local reporters that she was at a cash register when she heard gunshots.
“He started popping that gun,” she told WREG-TV. “It sounded a bit like a balloon popping. Tap, tap, tap, tap, tap — just like that.”
She said she played dead, and saw a male employee get shot in the head. He was still able to talk, she said.
“This right here is not going to stop me from working,” she said. “I’m going to work on.”
The Memphis Police Department said its officers were on the scene of the shooting and “assisting with securing the perimeter and scene.”
Local news stations showed a line of ambulances at the store with their lights flashing, as well as a group of employees gathered in the parking lot with police officers.
Alyssa Lukpat contributed reporting.
The shooting on Thursday in Collierville, Tenn., came six months after a man armed with a military-style semiautomatic rifle and a pistol opened fire in a King Soopers grocery store in Boulder, Colo., killing 10 people, including a police officer. King Soopers is owned by Kroger.
No motive has been publicly explained for that attack.
In October 2018, a white man shot two Black people at a Kroger store in Jeffersontown, Ky., in a racially motivated attack. The man, Gregory Bush, was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole last year after pleading guilty but mentally ill to the murders of Vickie Lee Jones and Maurice E. Stallard.
In August, one person was killed and another person was injured in a shooting in the parking lot of Kroger in Sandy Springs, Ga., a northern suburb of Atlanta, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported. The newspaper said that shooting had been the result of a botched drug deal.
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