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At least seven people in the Kalamazoo, Mich., area were killed and several were critically injured Saturday night by a gunman who the police said randomly opened fire as he drove around the city and its suburbs.
Several anxious hours later, the police announced they had taken a suspect in custody and found weapons in his car.
“We do have a very strong suspect in custody right now,” Chief Jeff Hadley of the Kalamazoo County Department of Public Safety told WWMT-TV, the local CBS affiliate.
Shootings were reported at a Cracker Barrel restaurant, a Ford dealership and other locations, according to WOOD-TV, the local NBC affiliate.
At the Cracker Barrel, in Texas Township, the victims were shot as they sat in their cars, according to the television report.
The five people killed there included a 9-year-old, the authorities said..
A father and his son were killed at the car dealership, the authorities said.
Two more shootings occurred at an intersection near the restaurant and at a residence in Richland Township, where a woman was shot multiple times, according to WOOD-TV.
No fatalities were reported in either of those locations.
“They all appear to be related,” said Undersheriff Paul Matyas, a spokesman for the Kalamazoo County Sheriff’s Department. “We have multiple people dead. In summary, what it looks like is we have somebody just driving around, finding people and shooting them dead in their tracks.”
Lt. Dale Hintz of the Michigan State Police told WWMT-TV that the gunman had been driving around Kalamazoo County in a dark blue Chevrolet HHR.
The suspect in custody was driving a vehicle that matched the description of that car, the authorities said, and the Chevrolet also appeared to match shots of the vehicle from surveillance video at the Ford dealership. The authorities described the suspect as a 45-year-old from Kalamazoo.
“It’s very likely this is the person, but we have more work to do to be 100 percent sure,” Chief Hadley said.
He said officers from the Department of Public Safety and deputies from the Kalamazoo Sheriff’s Department spotted the suspect’s car in downtown Kalamazoo, pulled him over and arrested him.
No shots were fired during the arrest, he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/21/us/kalamazoo-michigan-shootings.html
