A man opened fire on people who were watching a hockey game in Rhode Island, killing two and wounding three others, in an attack that was interrupted when a bystander intervened and fired at the shooter, authorities said.
Investigators spoke to nearly 100 witnesses by Monday night, the 16th, as they tried to piece together what happened earlier at the Dennis M. Lynch Arena in Pawtucket, a short distance from Providence in the northeastern United States.
“This appears to have been a targeted event, which may have been a family dispute,” Pawtucket Police Chief Tina Gonçalves said. Authorities said the two people who died were adults, but did not release the identities of the victims.
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Gonçalves said the shooter was an active employee at General Dynamics Bath Iron Works, a shipyard in Bath, Maine, which has contracts with the U.S. Navy, said David Hench, a spokesman for the shipyard, on Tuesday. Hench did not immediately respond to questions about the man’s position or how long he had worked at the yard.
The Monday shooting came nearly two months after Rhode Island was rocked by a shooting at Brown University that left two students dead and nine others injured, along with a professor from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Authorities later found Claudio Neves Valente, 48, dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound at a storage facility in New Hampshire.
“Our state is grieving again,” Rhode Island Governor Dan McKee said in a statement. “As governor, a father and a former coach, my heart breaks for the victims, families, students, and all those affected by the devastating shooting at the Lynch Arena in Pawtucket.”
