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At least five people were fatally shot on Thursday as a 15-year-old boy carved a trail of bloodshed through a residential neighborhood in Raleigh, the authorities said, leaving a crime scene that stretched over two miles and setting off a sprawling investigation to determine a motive for the attacks.
“We don’t have answers as to why this tragedy occurred,” Chief Estella Patterson of the Raleigh Police Department told reporters during a briefing on Friday morning.
The dead include a city police officer, Gabriel Torres, 29, who was on his way to work when he was shot on Thursday afternoon, Chief Patterson said. She identified the other victims as a 52-year-old woman, a 49-year-old woman, a 35-year-old woman and a 16-year-old boy.
The suspected gunman, whose identity the authorities have not disclosed, is in a hospital in critical condition, the authorities said. It is unclear how and when he was injured. Two other people were wounded in the shootings, Chief Patterson said: a 59-year-old man who was in critical condition and a police officer who was treated at a hospital and released.
It was not immediately clear whether any of the victims knew the gunman.
The shooting occurred in the Hedingham neighborhood in the northeast of Raleigh, where homes and golf courses sit near the Neuse River Greenway, a bike and walking trail that winds through wetlands and pine groves.
When the police responded late Thursday afternoon, they arrived to discover the bodies of two victims on a street lined with tidy duplex homes, and then found others scattered in the neighborhood and on the nearby trail, the authorities said.
The attacks prompted the authorities to implore residents to stay in their homes or away from the neighborhood as officers began a manhunt. Eventually, the police said that the gunman had been contained, and by 9:37 p.m., he was taken into custody.
“It was a long standoff, a long situation,” Chief Patterson said.
The burst of violence has plunged Raleigh into a familiar agony, as the latest American community forced to grapple with the aftermath of a mass shooting.
“There are several families in our community waking up this morning without their loved ones,” Raleigh’s mayor, Mary-Ann Baldwin, said during the news conference on Friday morning.
“I saw the faces of Raleigh police officers last night and their pain was evident, and I know that is happening all over the city,” Gov. Roy Cooper of North Carolina said on Friday. “Today, we’re sad, we’re angry and we want to know the answers to all the questions. Those questions will be answered — some today and more over time.”
Even as investigators were still searching to understand the motivation for the attack and how it unfolded, Mr. Cooper said it was already clear that elected officials needed to do more to address the scourge of gun violence.
“We all know the core truth: No neighborhood, no parent, no children, no grandparent — no one — should feel this fear in their communities. No one,” Mr. Cooper, a Democrat, said during the news conference. “As policymakers we cannot and will not turn away from what has happened here. We must be resolved to make changes and to succeed.”
In the neighborhood where the shooting took place, residents were reeling, overwhelmed by the chaos and confusion that had been unleashed by the attack, as well as by the horror of such violence hitting so close to home.
“I can’t believe this is happening in my neighborhood,” Cheryl St. James, a nurse, said late Thursday as she inched her car through traffic caused by a crush of police and emergency vehicles. “It’s scary.”
On Eagle Trace Drive, about a mile and a half from where the shooting occurred, sirens could be heard on Thursday night wailing in the distance as cars inched forward and police vehicles with flashing lights nosed through.
Ethan Garner, a project manager who has lived in the area for three years, said that he had left to get something to eat in the early evening. Hours later, he was sitting in his car, watching television on his phone as police officers attended to the crime scene.
“I leave my doors unlocked,” he said. “Yeah, I have cameras, but I never worry about anything like that. Nothing’s ever happened.”
