Three black people, including a woman, were shot and killed after an armed suspect entered a Dollar General store in Jacksonville, Florida, before shooting himself, authorities said Saturday. Killed people with R style rifle.
Sheriff TK Waters said at a news conference Saturday: “The shooter, a white male in his early 20s, was wearing a tactical jacket and armed with an AR-style rifle and a handgun. when he opened fire inside a Dollar General discount store.”
“He targeted a specific group of people and that’s black people. That’s what he said he wanted to kill. And that’s very clear,” the sheriff said.
“There were two male and one female victims,” according to the sheriff.
“A manifesto discovered by the gunman’s family shortly before the attack detailed the shooter’s hateful ideology,” he told reporters.
Jacksonville Mayor Donna Deegan earlier told JEE News: “There were multiple fatalities inside the store.”
Previously, authorities had not been able to provide an exact number of people killed in the Jacksonville store shooting.
City Fire Department spokesman Eric Prosomer told JEE News the department is ready to treat victims.
Many police officers are in the area near Edward Waters University, a small historically black university.
Deegan told the media: “It’s unacceptable. One shooting is too many but these mass shootings are really hard to tolerate.”
Mass shootings have become disturbingly common across America, with most states having easy access to firearms and the nation having more guns than citizens.
Earlier in the day, at least seven people were hospitalized after a mass shooting at a Caribbean festival in northeast Boston, police said.
The night before, two women were shot at a baseball game in Chicago.
A 16-year-old boy was shot to death and four others were injured after an altercation at a high school football game in Oklahoma that night, local police said.
The Jacksonville shooting comes after a self-proclaimed white supremacist killed 10 black people in a live-streamed shooting spree at a New York supermarket in May 2022.
Payton Gendron planned the attack for months, targeting the Tops Friendly Market in Buffalo because of the large African-American population in the surrounding area.
He confessed to the killings in November.
Saturday’s mass shooting in Jacksonville comes five years after a similar incident in the city, when a gunman at a video game tournament killed two people and wounded several others before killing himself.
