THE NEW YORK TIMES: Suspect and officer dead after shooting outside CDC in Atlanta
A gunman who believed the coronavirus vaccine was to blame for his ailments opened fire Friday outside of the headquarters of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, killing a police officer and striking the exteriors of several buildings on the CDC campus, law enforcement officials said.
The gunman was found fatally shot, but no civilians were hit by gunfire, officials said.
Officials reported an active shooter just before 5 p.m. at a CVS drugstore on Clifton Road, which is directly across from the main entrance to the CDC headquarters. Officers found the gunman on the second floor of the CVS, but it was unclear if he had been struck in an exchange of gunfire with police or if the gunshot was self-inflicted, Chief Darin Schierbaum of the Atlanta Police Department said Friday evening.
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The man appeared to have had a long-brewing fixation about the vaccine, according to a senior law enforcement official who spoke anonymously to discuss an ongoing investigation. The official added that the man believed that the shot had been the cause of his physical illness. The man’s father had reported him to authorities earlier Friday, saying that he was suicidal.
Officer David Rose of the DeKalb County Police Department was one of the first officers to arrive and was killed, officials said.
Rose, 33, had two children, and his wife is pregnant with a third. He had served in the U.S. Marines before becoming an officer.
The shooting comes as the COVID vaccine — an achievement that curbed the pandemic’s spread but became the subject of conspiracy theories and political divisions — has faced renewed skepticism since Robert F. Kennedy Jr. became health secretary.
The CDC is an institution at the core of Atlanta’s identity. The headquarters are in the northeast corner of the city, adjacent to the main campus of Emory University and Emory University Hospital.
The shooting prompted the CDC to issue an urgent warning to its employees: Run, hide or fight “as a last resort,” the message said. Emory sent a similar message telling students and faculty members to seek shelter and avoid the area. After roughly an hour, Atlanta police said there was “no ongoing threat.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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Originally published on The New York Times
