Puwtucket, Rhode Island: A shooting inside a Rhode Island hockey rink Monday left three people dead, including the shooter, three others injured and the two high school teams playing fleeing the ice as it all unfolded.
Three others were hospitalised in critical state, according to authorities.
Pawtucket Police Chief Tina Goncalves stated that a bystander helped quickly stop afternoon’s violent incident by intervening and attempting to subdue the shooter, who had been at the arena to watch a family member’s hockey game.
The shooter died from an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound, she said, adding that the investigation is ongoing.
“It appears that this was a targeted event, that it may be a family dispute,” she said, according to AP.
Goncalves identified the shooter as Robert Dorgan, who she said also went by the name Roberta Esposito and was born in 1969. Goncalves did not provide details about the ages of those who were killed, though she said it appeared that both victims were adults. The three people injured were hospitalized in critical condition as of Monday night.
She said investigators are working to reconstruct the events and have interviewed numerous witnesses who were inside Dennis M. Lynch Arena in Pawtucket, just outside Providence. Authorities are also reviewing video from the hockey game. Unverified clips spreading on social media show players diving for cover and spectators fleeing as popping sounds are heard.
Grieving families and high school hockey players still in uniform were seen embracing before boarding buses to leave the scene outside the arena, the report noted.
The suspect’s daughter in the Rhode Island shooting confirmed that her father was the shooter, noting that he had been ill and faced mental health challenges.
According to local station WPRI, Dorgan is the father of a senior at North Providence High School who was participating in the hockey tournament. Multiple sources told the outlet that the student’s mother and sibling were among those killed, adding the mother died inside Lynch Arena, while the sibling passed away at a hospital.
Monday’s shooting occurred nearly two months after another act of gun violence in Rhode Island at Brown University, where a gunman killed two students and injured nine others. That attacker also fatally shot a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor. Authorities later found 48-year-old Claudio Neves Valente dead from a self-inflicted gunshot at a storage facility in New Hampshire.
Pawtucket Mayor Don Grebien mentioned, “The fortunate thing is that the two incidents are not related, but it is very tragic. These are high school kids. They were doing an event, they were playing with their families watching, a fun time, and it turned into this.”
