Eight people, including two children, were shot in a mass killing in Erie, Pennsylvania, on Friday evening, according to local law enforcement. The shooter is also dead.
Authorities have not named the victims or the shooter or described the motive behind the incident, which took place at a home in east Erie.
Erie Police Chief Rick Lorah said during a news conference Saturday that seven of the victims were family members and related to the shooter. Another victim was a family friend.
The victims included two children — a 1-year-old and a 5-year-old — and six adults ranging in age from 19 to 51. One adult victim was eight months pregnant.
The shooter, a 45-year-old man, appeared to have died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
Lorah said that police arrived on the scene in response to an acoustic gunshot detection alert to find two deceased women outside the residence.
Ring camera footage from a neighbor, Lorah said, showed those two women “arriving at the residence appearing distressed.”
“They were trying to get neighbors’ attention. They were pounding on the door. We hear what we believe to be, what we assume to be, muffled gunshots in that audio very faintly, a scream and then two shots fired, and that’s where we believe those two outside victims were killed,” Lorah said.
When police arrived on the scene, they did not see any motion or hear noise from inside the home. SWAT officers breached doors of the property and deployed a robot to assess the scene. When victims were identified, officers entered the home. After entering, they found the two children on the first floor of the home, and the shooter, as well as four adults, on the second floor.
The suspect had a 40-caliber handgun registered in his name. Lorah declined to name a motive for the killing, but said, “I think that mental health is at play here.”
Erie Mayor Daria Devlin, addressing surviving family members at Saturday’s news conference, said, “I am so deeply sorry. What happened to you was horrific and there is nothing that any of us can say today that will make any of this any easier.”
Speaking to reporters near the crime scene overnight, Lorah had called it “one of the worst situations, if not the worst situation, that I have ever experienced in my 28-plus years as a police officer.”
Investigators determined that all of the deaths occurred before law enforcement officers arrived and that the deaths were not the result of a standoff or delay in police action, according to a joint statement released earlier Saturday from the city of Erie and its police department.
No additional gunshots were fired after police arrived, but flash bangs were deployed, they said.
“I’ve spoken with Mayor Devlin and offered my Administration’s full support following the tragic mass shooting in Erie last night — killing nine of our fellow Pennsylvanians,” Shapiro (D) wrote on X. “My heart breaks for this family.”
Erie, which has about 90,000 residents, is some 117 miles north of Pittsburgh.
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