By Steve Gorman
(Reuters) – Following a spate of deadly mass shootings at a supermarket in New York, an elementary school in Texas and a hospital in Oklahoma came yet another burst of gun violence on Thursday that left multiple people wounded at a cemetery in Wisconsin.
The police department in Racine, Wisconsin, a suburb of Milwaukee, reported on Twitter that multiple gunshots were fired at Graceland Cemetery, leaving an unspecified number of victims, but few additional details were given.
Milwaukee television station TMJ4 News, citing family members attending the grave-side service, said five relatives of the man who was being buried at the time were struck by gunfire, though their conditions were not immediately known.
A man who lives across the street from the cemetery, Rey Brantley, told the TV station he was picking his daughter up from school when he heard gunfire, and that his son was playing basketball nearby and came close to being shot.
“Who in their right mind would go and shoot up a funeral in broad daylight,” Brantley said in an on-camera interview. “Those people were attending a funeral.”
His son, Trey Brantley, said he heard “bullets whistling past us” and ran for cover with others.
TMJ4 reported that a nearby hospital was placed under a security lockdown and that a high school dismissed its students about 10 minutes later than usual, after law enforcement assured school officials it was safe to do so.
There was no word on whether any suspect had been identified. Police urged members of the public to assist investigators by coming forward with any video footage they might have of the incident.
The shooting came a day after a gunman killed four people and himself at a medical center in Tulsa, Oklahoma. One of the victims was an orthopedic surgeon who had treated the suspect.
Nineteen school children and two teachers were shot to death on May 24 during a siege at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, that ended when police killed the 18-year-old assailant.
And an 18-year-old avowed white supremacist, also armed with a semiautomatic weapon, killed 10 people, most of them Black, at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York, on May 14 in what authorities said was a racially motivated attack.
The suspect in the Buffalo shooting, who surrendered to police, pleaded not guilty on Thursday to 25 counts in an indictment returned by a grand jury.
(Reporting by Steve Gorman in Los Angeles; Editing by Michael Perry)
