Guest recalls ‘bullets flying’ as 3 shot, 1 fatally, in shooting at 86th Street hotel
INDIANAPOLIS (WISH) — A man died around 11 a.m. Tuesday after a shooting ripped through a third-floor hotel room, a spokesperson for the Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department told News 8. According to police, two other people were left with critical injuries.
The name of the man been released to the public yet.
J.J. Smith has been at the Extended Stay America hotel off West 86th Street near I-465 for over a year. His hotel room is just across the hall from where the shooting broke out.
“The next thing you hear is all heck breaks loose across the hall – I’m literally right across the hall. The next thing I know, I got bullets flying through the room,” he said.
Smith tells News 8 that right before the gunfire started, there was yelling coming from the room. The yelling stopped when the gunfire started.
Smith says he hit the floor as bullets whizzed through the room. One of the bullets, he says, missed him by just a few inches. In the silence after the gunfire, Smith said he heard a woman screaming in the hall. By that time, the cops had arrived.
“Oh, they had long guns, they (were) already in the halls. They (were) screaming, ‘The shooter is still in here! The shooter is still in here!’ I mean, it was chaos,” Smith said.
Police say four people were in the room when the shooting started. A woman, the one person in the hotel room who wasn’t injured, sat on the front step of the hotel talking to police. Two others were taken to the hospital, and the fourth was pronounced at the scene.
Smith tells News 8 that he overheard police saying that the man who was shot had criminal warrants out against him.
Officer Samone Burris, a public information officer with IMPD, did not confirm or deny the warrant. “Once we unpack what took place and get everyone identified, that could likely be the case,” Burris said.
Police say they are working to determine if the shooter or shooters are among the four people in the room. “We don’t have anyone in custody as far as a suspect or anything like that we are still trying to navigate what took place and what happened,” Burris said.
Police have not said how people were shooting, if more than one gun was involved, or how many shots were fired.