(via aol.com)
A gunman wounded a doctor inside Baltimore’s Johns Hopkins Hospital today, then fatally shot his mother and himself, police said.
Police had partially evacuated the building while pursuing the suspect.
The gunman, Warren Davis, 50, shot the doctor after receiving some upsetting news about his mother’s condition, Baltimore Police Commissioner Frederick Bealefeld told reporters.
“Mr. Davis was receiving some news about the care and condition of his mother just outside the doorway to that room when he became emotionally distraught,” Bealefeld said.
He then ran into the room, brandishing the gun. When police entered the room later, they found his mother dead in her bed and Davis sprawled on the floor, mortally wounded.
Bealefeld identified her as Jean Davis but said he didn’t know why she had been in the hospital.
The doctor was shot in the lower chest and upper abdomen and was initially listed in critical condition but was upgraded to a non-life-threatening injury and was undergoing surgery, police said.
“The doctor will be OK,” Baltimore police spokesman Anthony Guglielmi said “He’s in the best place in the world — Johns Hopkins Hospital.”
The hospital sent out an emergency text message alert to staff at 11:15 a.m.
“Shooter incident on Nelson 8 at JHH,” the alert said, according to The Baltimore Sun. “Stay in your office or room and lock doors until an all clear is announced. Stay away from windows. Wait for further instruction.”
“We have that floor contained,” Guglielmi told CNN during the standoff. “We’re in the process of conducting a tactical operation, and there’s a small portion of the hospital that’s being evacuated. … The situation is contained to a small portion.”
SWAT teams and snipers surrounded the sprawling medical complex in east Baltimore. Hopkins is one of the world’s leading medical institutions.
Among those in the hospital was AOL FanHouse boxing writer and editor Lem Satterfield. He was being treated in another building, about a five-minute walk from the Nelson building, and was unharmed in today’s shooting.
“I was coming up from getting blood drawn, and a worker here told me as I was on the elevator coming up to the second floor from the first floor that there was a shooting … in the main hospital, and that employees were being told to stay away from the windows,” Satterfield told AOL News.
“I wasn’t alarmed because I knew it was relatively remote from where I was at,” he said, adding that when people in his waiting room saw the report on TV, there was “no panic whatsoever.”
“We were excited, wanted to know what was going on,” Satterfield said. “Everybody was watching, couldn’t believe what we were seeing. They were surprised it was happening around them, [but] nobody was running around.”
Jacqueline Billy, a nurse at Johns Hopkins, said she accidentally took the elevator to the eighth floor after the shooting, where she saw police with their guns drawn. “I was petrified — the door opened and there are a bunch of guns,” she told the Sun. “You never expect that.”
