An investigator is seen through trees as he photographs the scene of a fatal shooting Friday, Feb. 26, 2016, near Belfair, Wash.
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280-a-17-(Chief Deputy Ryan Spurling, Mason County Sheriff’s Office, in AP interview)-“victims in there”-Mason County Chief Deputy Ryan Spurling says the man who had called police was holding a gun as they tried to get him to surrender”.
A child who appears to be the only survivor of a shooting in rural Washington state that left five people dead is related to the victims.
Mason County Sheriff’s officials confirm five bodies have been found on the property of a standoff near Belfair; one of the bodies was the shooter, who killed himself.
But a neighbor told Reuters he heard several bursts of gunfire coming from the wooded property Thursday, assuming it was target shooting, and a Seattle Times account indicated the gunman himself had called police Friday morning to report he had shot four others.
Circumstances of the violence that unfolded in a rural area near the community of Belfair, about 25 miles (40 km) west of Seattle across Puget Sound, were not immediately clear. Two sons were adopted from Russian Federation, and a daughter was adopted from China.
A teenage girl was also found on the property, though she was not seriously injured and was transported to an area hospital as a precaution, KING5 reported.
Authorities say officers negotiated with the man for about three hours before they entered the home and found the people dead.
The gunman “apparently came outside the home and shot himself”, Sheriff Casey Salisbury said. The sheriff’s office reported just after noon that one child did escape the incident.
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Officers had been negotiating with the man since Friday morning. He had recently been hospitalized, Pigott said, but he didn’t know why. When he returned home, he was on a lot of medications, Pigott said of the man.
