United States: Tennessee supermarket shooting kills one and injures a dozen

Another fatal shooting across the Atlantic. A gunman opened fire in a Tennessee supermarket, killing one and injuring a dozen before committing suicide, police said Thursday. Authorities were alerted to shootings at a Kroger chain supermarket in Collierville, a town on the outskirts of Memphis at 1:30 p.m. local time (6:30 p.m. GMT).

“When we got there, several people had been shot,” said Dale Lane, Collierville Police Chief. Twelve of them were taken to hospital and one died, he said. The shooter killed himself by turning the gun on him. The Collierville police chief called the scene “terrifying”. “I’ve never seen that in my 34-year career,” he lamented.

“People who were hiding in freezers”

“We found people hiding in freezers, and in closed offices, doing what they were trained to do: run, hide, fight,” Lane said. Memphis police said they had come to the scene to lend a hand.

Shootings of this type, especially in schools, supermarkets or places of worship, are a recurring scourge of American society that successive governments have been powerless to stem.