Four people, including two police officers, were killed in the United States by a suspect holed up in a house for a dozen hours, the Watauga County Sheriff's Office in North Carolina said Thursday (April 29th).
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Two officers had been dispatched yesterday, Wednesday morning, to a home near Boone, whose occupants had not reported to their work and were not answering the phone, the sheriff's services said in a statement. After seeing the presence of several vehicles, they entered the house, where they were greeted by gunfire. Reinforcements managed to extricate one of them, Chris Ward, who died in hospital, but failed to rescue his colleague Logan Fox, who died there. Two policemen and a gendarme came under fire while trying to come to his aid. One of them was hit but protected by his equipment, said the sheriff's services.
The maniac continued to shoot from time to time on the police, who took thirteen hours to regain control of the situation. "
The suspect who killed the two policemen is also suspected of having killed two civilians in the house,
" the statement said. Sheriff Len Hagaman told local network WSOC that the gunman was dead and the other two victims were his mother and stepfather. In the United States, where firearms are legion, an average of fifty police officers are killed on average each year in the exercise of their mission.