A man shot at people watching a hockey game in Rhode Island in an attack that was stopped when a spectator intervened and shot the gunman, authorities said.
Investigators spoke to nearly 100 witnesses as of Monday night as they try to piece together what happened earlier at the Dennis M. Lynch Arena in Pawtucket, just a few miles from Providence in the northeastern United States.
“It appears this was a targeted event that may have been a family dispute,” Pawtucket City Police Chief Tina Goncalves said. Authorities said the two people who died were adults, but they did not release the identities of the victims.
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Goncalves said the shooter was an active-duty employee at General Dynamics Bath Iron Works, a shipyard in Bath, Maine, that contracts with the U.S. Navy, David Hench, a spokesman for the shipyard, said Tuesday. Hench did not immediately respond to questions about the man’s job title or how long he had worked at the shipyard.
Monday’s shooting came nearly two months after Rhode Island was rocked by a shooting at Brown University that left two students dead and injured nine others, as well as a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor. Authorities later found 48-year-old Claudio Neves Valente dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound at a storage facility in New Hampshire.
“Our state is in mourning again,” Rhode Island Gov. Dan McKee said in a statement. “As a governor, father and former coach, my heart breaks for the victims, families, students and everyone impacted by the devastating shooting at Lynch Arena in Pawtucket.”
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