Police in Seattle are searching for a gunman following reports three people have been shot in a casino.
The incident occurred just before 11pm on Saturday (May 27) at the Roxbury Lanes & Casino establishment in the southwest of the city, the Seattle Police Department said.
Officers responded to reports of multiple people being shot at the casino and bowling alley and found three victims suffering from gunshot wounds at the scene.
All three were subsequently taken to Harborview Medical Center for treatment, reports ABC News.
There, a hospital official told local station KOMO that the victims are two men and a woman.
Cops say the gunman entered the premises and began shooting without warning.
Investigators are still working to establish the attacker’s identity and determine a motive, officials said.
It comes in the same week the United States Postal Service was forced to pause deliveries to an entire Seattle zip code for seven days because of a crime crisis in the city.
Around 900 residents did not receive their mail as delivery services were halted due to mail theft and ‘equipment security concerns’. Instead they were told to pick up their mail from the local post office and stood in long queues of up to an hour before USPS lifted the ban.
Thieves had stolen a master key which is used by the USPS to open collection boxes, cluster box units and outdoor parcel lockers. Reports say that the move came as data provided by the Postal Inspection Service showed robberies of postal carriers across the US had quadrupled over 10 years and that weapons were used in most of the 496 robberies last year.
It showed that in the first half of the 2023 fiscal year, 305 letter carriers were robbed with more than 25,000 reports of high-volume theft incidents from mail receptacles. The robberies have seen USP carriers threatened with guns.
Reports say that Seattle’s violent crime rate is at a 15-year high based on its annual crime statistics from 2022, with 5,642 cases reported, including 52 murders, 321 rapes, 1,759 robberies and 3,510 aggravated assaults.
