14 DAY TRIAL // A gunman has been killed in a confrontation with police forces after setting fire to a house and spraying bullets in the street near Santa Monica college. He fatally shot five people before his spree came to an end.
According to Perez Hilton, the college was on lockdown after news of a shooting broke on the main campus.
Finals were canceled and students were told not to go outside or open doors and windows. All the schools in the city were closed down because of the incident.
The shooter set off from 2000 block of Yorkshire Avenue and ended up on the college campus, Santa Monica Police Chief Jacqueline Seabrooks tells the LA Times.
He killed two people on Yorkshire Avenue, then opened fire at random on Pico Boulevard, also causing property damage.
The suspect set fire to a home in the area, and police found two people dead inside. One of the male victims had been shot, WTVD reported.
"There was a guy standing in the street, dressed in full SWAT gear with a semi-automatic rifle in his hand and a belt full of ammunition," a witness describes the house fire scene.
The suspect made his way to the school library where he was shot by police officers, Seabrooks said in a press conference, as relayed by the Santa Monica Patch.
"We didn't know what was happening until all the students at the entrance of the library started running down towards the bottom of the library," student Sam Luster recalls.
"One of the doors wasn't opening so a lot of kids were panicking against the locked door and funneled around to the other side," student Chad Lazzari says, adding that a chaos ensued as roughly one hundred people hurried to get out of the building.