Police now say five people, including a small child, were injured in a gunfight at an outlet mall in the Phoenix suburb of Glendale on Wednesday.
Glendale, Ariz. Five people, including a small child, were injured when a gunfight broke out at an outlet mall in the Phoenix area on Wednesday and hundreds of people fled.
Earlier, police said at least three people, including a child, had been shot and wounded and one had life-threatening injuries. At a brief news conference Wednesday evening, police said no injuries were fatal.
Glendale police officer Tiffany Engalula said the incident at the Tanger outlet in a mall in a busy recreation district in the western suburbs of Glendale was “a brawl between two groups of people” which turned into a fight and then a shootout.
A young man armed with a handgun was in the mall with a woman and a small child, police said. The man got into an argument with a group of young men he knew, and police said he was shot.
According to police, two teenage men in the second group arrived at the hospital with gunshot wounds and the man with the woman and child was taken to hospital for treatment of an unknown injury.
The names of the five injured were not immediately released.
Hundreds of people who fled the gunfire, as well as nervous friends and relatives who rushed to the scene, lined up in the parking lot near the mall hours after the shooting.
The mall and nearby businesses remained in lockdown as police searched and cleared shops covering people. Engalula said officers still have hundreds of people to interview, a task that will probably last until late at night.
At a checkpoint in the mall’s parking lot, police were seen stopping motorists and inspecting the trunks of oncoming vehicles. Elsewhere, just outside the entrance to a mall, yellow crime scenes were taped.
Authorities in the vicinity responded to reports of gunfire around 2:40 a.m. in an outdoor courtyard of the mall. The mall is a parking lot from the Westgate Entertainment District and a few streets away from the Arizona Cardinals Football Stadium and the Arizona Coyotes Hockey Arena.
Governor Doug Dusi said he was monitoring the situation.
“Once again, Arizona law enforcement officers have shown the courage to keep our community safe,” Dusi wrote on Twitter. “Thank you to all the men and women in blue for your courage and service.”
The shootings came almost two years after a gunman wounded three people in Westgate.
In that shooting, the 20-year-old suspect, Armando Hernandez, walked through the entertainment district, returned to his car to make a social media video and load three rifle magazines. Glendale police said the gunman held a cellphone in his left hand and a shotgun with a rifle in his right hand during the blast.
Hernandez pleaded not guilty. His case is set to be heard in June.