Officers are investigating a shooting at Irving Mall in Irving, Texas. The shopping centre was evacuated due to the incident.
A little before 4:40 PM, Sunday, the Irving Police Department tweeted about a possible shooting at the mall located close to the intersection of State Highway 183 and North Belt Line Road, where the shooting reportedly occurred at 4:00 PM.
A person visiting the mall recorded people scrambling to escape when they heard gunshots.
Robert Reeves, an Iriving police spokesperson, noted that the shooting occurred after an argument had broken out between two people, on the south side of the mall near the food court. At the time of evacuation, there were around 300 people in the Washington Prime Group-owned shopping centre.
“During that disturbance, one of the individuals pulled out a gun and shot at the other one”, The Dallas Morning News reported Reeves saying.
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Though the bullet struck a mall entrance door, nobody was hurt in the incident, the spokesperson added.
As per Reeves, security camera footage from the mall indicates that the men knew each other and Irving PD are not treating it as an active shooter situation. The investigation is ongoing.
Authorities didn’t share any details about the victim or the suspect and didn’t report any injuries due to the incident. People were asked to avoid the area for some time.
One Twitter user commented, “why are people shooting the Irving mall so much”, while another noted, “While I do take mass shootings seriously, I must admit that just as shocking as the news of hearing of a potential shooting at the Irving Mall, is the news that there’s still an Irving Mall.”
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The mall, which opened its doors in 1971, saw its first shooting in 1990 when a man named Todd Broom shot and killed a man named Eddie Edwards, who was chasing his girlfriend down the parking lot and had opened fire on the woman, killing her.
The more famous incident came in 1993 when two gangs got into an altercation and the subsequent shooting left one dead and two injured.
