BETHESDA, Md., May 6 (UPI) — Maryland police are investigating separate shootings Friday, at a shopping mall and grocery store, that killed two people and wounded two others, authorities said.
The first shooting happened in a parking lot outside the Westfield Montgomery Mall in Bethesda, officials said.
“One individual was shot. Two other individuals came to that person’s aid,” Montgomery County Police Assistant Chief Darryl McSwain said.
One of the victims, a man, died at the hospital, another man is in critical condition and the third victim, a woman, sustained non life-threatening injuries, police said Friday afternoon.
“We’re working hard to track this person,” Paul Starks, the spokesman for the Montgomery County Police Department, said Friday.
Witness Jose Mauricio Gomez told the Washington Post that he heard between 6 and 8 gunshots and saw a woman on the ground. He, a police officer and another man ran to her aid and saw she was conscious and bleeding.
“Blood shot out of her, the hole in her shoulder, and [the officer] sat her back down,” he said, adding that he put pressure on her wound until paramedics arrived. “I lived the war in El Salvador. I’ve witnessed gun battles before.”
A short time later at a grocery store in Silver Spring, about 8 miles away, another shooting left a fourth victim, a woman, dead. Police said they weren’t certain whether the two shooting incidents are related.
Police said there is a person of interest in the case, but the shooter has not been located.
Montgomery County Police said all of the victims appear to be adults. Friday’sshooting occurred about 11:30 a.m. EDT.
Police said they do not believe the shooter and victims knew each other.
Friday’s shootings happened hours after another killing in the area Thursday in Beltsville, about 10 miles east of Silver Spring. Police had been searching for suspect Eulalio Tordil, 62, in that incident — in which officials said he killed his estranged wife in the parking lot of a local high school. He hasn’t yet been captured.
The Prince George‘s County Police Department said it was looking into the possibility that all the shootings were carried out by the same person. On Tordil’s wanted poster, it says he has threatened to “commit suicide by cop.”
Tordil had recently been stripped of his gun and badge from his law enforcement job at the Federal Protective Service, when a civil court issued a protective order against him for alleged abuse, according to an official with the agency and court documents.
Nearby schools ordered students and staff to shelter in place Friday, and Suburban Hospital in Bethesda was placed on lockdown. Montgomery parks were also on lockdown, NBC News reported.
The National Institutes of Health said it had also put their leased facilities in the Bethesda and Rockville areas on lockdown, the Washington Post reported. The NIH main campus in Bethesda is on “heightened alert” according to Brad Moss, a NIH spokesman.
This is a developing story
