Atlanta mass shooting suspect in custody: Police

Washington, May 4

The Atlanta Police Department announced that it has taken into custody the suspect in a deadly mass shooting in the US city.

The shooter has been identified as 24-year-old Deion Patterson, who on Wednesday opened fire at Northside Hospital medical facility in Atlanta, leaving one person dead and four others injured, reports Xinhua news agency.

The victim, Amy St. Pierre, had worked for the Atlanta-based Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

At a news conference announcing the arrest late Wednesday night, Atlanta Police Deputy Chief Charles Hampton said the suspect spent about two minutes in the facility before he left on foot and went to a nearby fuel station.

There, the gunman found and took an unattended pickup truck, CNN quoted Hampton as saying.

Roughly 20 minutes later, cameras picked up the vehicle's tag number and police were alerted the suspect was in Cobb County, just northwest of Atlanta, he added.

"Technology played a huge role," Cobb County Police Chief Stuart VanHoozer said during the news conference.

"But technology doesn't do any good without people who are determined to capture an individual that would do something like this. And today we saw where those two things came together."

Meanwhile, the hospital said that the facility will remain closed on Thursday and that all patient appointments were cancelled.

"This was a horrible act of gun violence, but equally horrifying is that we know that this is not unique in our country," CNN quoted Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens as saying on Wednesday night.

"We need more actions (for) the rights of our citizens to go about their lives, to be able to go to a doctor's office, to a supermarket, to a gas station or to their school without the threat of being gunned down."

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters that President Joe Biden was "frustrated" by the frequent occurrence of mass shootings in the country.

Including the Atlanta incident, there have been at least 191 mass shootings in the US so far this year, according to the Gun Violence Archive, which defines a mass shooting as one in which at least four people are shot, excluding the shooter.

More than 14,200 people have lost their lives due to gun violence across the country in the past several months, the website's data showed.