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Nine dead after new US shooting

February 27, 2015

Seven are dead following a Missouri mass murder, including the suspected gunman, who police say took his own life. It appeared that seven were shot in four different residences in the small Bible Belt town of Tyrone.

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USA in Missouri
Image: picture alliance/AP Photo/J. McNiell

Before committing suicide, a gunman went from house to house late Thursday, fatally shooting seven people and wounding one in a depressed southern Missouri town of 2,000 people about 40 miles (65 kilometers) from the Arkansas border, authorities said on Friday. Police found a ninth person, described as an elderly woman, dead in a fifth house, "from natural causes," the Missouri State Highway Patrol announced.

"The apparent suspect, a 36-year-old male from Tyrone, was found dead in a vehicle ... from an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound," police spokesman Sergeant Jeff Kinder said on Friday.

Pending notification of next of kin, police did not immediately release the names of the victim or the shooter on Friday, and did not say whether the suspected killer had any relationship with the other deceased individuals.

'This is bad'

The first report of the shootings came just before 10:30 p.m. local time on Thursday (0430 UTC Friday), when a girl called the Texas County Sheriff's Office. She had heard gunshots in her home and fled to a neighbor's place to notify the authorities, Kinder said on Friday.

"Responding deputies found two deceased persons" at that first house, Kinder said, and then five more bodies in three other residences. In another house, police found the body of an elderly woman, but Kinder said that she appeared to have died of unrelated, natural causes and "we're not calling her a victim at this time."

Police knocked on the doors of other Tyrone homes in the early hours of Friday, telling residents to stay inside and not to open their doors to strangers, the Herald newspaper in Houston, Missouri, reported. By late morning, yellow police tape surrounded one of the crime scenes, a simple single-story white house with a small front porch, sitting amid a blanket of snow under a blue sky.

"You know what?" said Kinder, who at one point lost count himself how many people died in how many different places. "In our job we see a lot of bad stuff - and this is bad."

mkg/msh (AFP, dpa, AP)