The gunfire broke out inside a food court at the Mall of Louisiana in Baton Rouge on Thursday, leaving one person dead and five others wounded, police said. Police Chief TJ Morse said an officer was already at the mall and ran toward the gunfire as an exchange unfolded, which began around 1:30 p.m. Morse described the incident as a confrontation between two groups of people rather than a random attack, and said police were still trying to unravel what set off the shooting.
Morse said five people were in custody after the shooting and that there was no ongoing threat to the public. Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill said some innocent bystanders were struck. Police also said they would not release victims’ names until families have been notified.
In Lafayette Parish, President Monique Blanco Boulet said three high school seniors from Ascension Episcopal School were among the victims. A spokesperson for the school, Rachel Delcambre, said in an email that the school would not provide additional information at that time “out of deep respect for the families and the sensitivity of this situation.”
Mall spokesperson Lindsay Kahn called it a “frightening day” for everyone there and said the Mall of Louisiana would not reopen Thursday. By late afternoon, dozens of police cars were clustered in the parking lot, helicopters hovered overhead and armed officers in bulletproof vests patrolled the area.
Witnesses and workers described quickly moving to safety as they learned an active-shooter situation was underway. Kennedy Barnum, 22, said she went to the mall to get lunch at the food court and heard a woman outside the mall on the phone say, “I’ll call you back. There’s an active shooter in the mall.” Barnum said that within about five minutes, law enforcement had swarmed the mall and she saw people running and crying, including one girl she described as “hysterical.”
Workers who were inside the mall when the gunfire erupted said they hid while police arrived. Alex Theriot, a commercial electrician working on construction in the mall a few hundred feet from the food court, said he heard what sounded like plates of glass shattering and locked down his work site and hid with two other workers. Theriot told The Associated Press that he thought it could have been a terrorist attack.
Desire Batton, who works at a clothing store, said she and other workers dashed into a breakroom to protect themselves and hid until police came and got them. She said, “We hid in there until cops came and got us.”
Authorities initially said as many as 10 people had been injured, but later revised that number to five wounded. Morse did not immediately say what set off the shooting inside the mall.
Morse said the incident was at least the second high-profile case of gun violence in Louisiana this week, following a father’s attack on his family in Shreveport earlier this week. MSI previously reported that the father fatally shot eight children, including seven of his own, in an attack that stretched across two houses in a Shreveport neighborhood.