At least four people killed at Tulsa hospital; gunman had ‘intent,’ police say

Wednesday’s shooting at St. Francis Hospital in Tulsa comes exactly 101 years after the Tulsa Race Massacre, in which a White mob pillaged a Black neighborhood in the city in one of the worst episodes of racial violence in the nation’s history.

The 1921 massacre went overnight from May 30 to June 1 in the Greenwood neighborhood — just a few miles from Wednesday’s shooting — which was at the time one of the wealthiest Black communities in the nation. The slaughter was sparked by false accusations that a Black shoe shiner assaulted a White elevator operator, and it left as many as 300 people dead.

There was no evidence that the hospital shooting and the anniversary were connected, but the timing of such violence was sure to strike many in the city of 400,000.

When he traveled to Tulsa a year ago, President Biden was the first president to visit Greenwood since the massacre. He said at the time — and in a statement Wednesday — that “great nations do not hide from their histories.”

Naomi Andrews heard about the shooting in a deluge of messages from friends who were at or near the St. Francis medical campus, where she takes her kids to an orthopedic practice.

Shaken by the shooting Wednesday, Andrews, 39, thought back to other scares. She did not want her kids going to school the day after last month’s elementary school shooting in Uvalde, Tex. Her children went anyway — and their campus promptly went into lockdown because of a shooting threat, she said.

“It feels like the walls are closing in” with one incident after another, she said. The fact that people can carry a gun without a permit in Oklahoma exacerbates her fears.

Andrews said she grew up in a rural area handling guns. She remembered going to the shooting range with her grandfather: He “felt like I needed to see how dangerous [guns] were.”

Her daughter is supposed to go back to the doctor’s office soon. But it’s not a “safe place anymore,” said Andrews, who has four children ages 13, 14, 15 and 16.

The rampage in Tulsa was the 20th mass shooting since 19 children and two teachers were killed at an elementary school in Uvalde, Tex., last week, according to figures released by the Gun Violence Archive, a nonprofit, on Wednesday.

The archive defines mass shootings as involving four or more people who are shot or killed, not including the shooter. More than 200 such incidents have occurred this year, the nonprofit reported, meaning that on average, there has been at least one mass shooting every day.

Broadly, more than 8,000 people in the United States have died in shootings this year. More than 400 children have been shot, the archive said.

Mass shootings have been on the rise in recent years, according to the archive. In 2021, almost 700 such incidents occurred, a jump from the 611 in 2020 and 417 in 2019.

St. Francis Health System is anchored by a 1,112-bed hospital south of downtown Tulsa. The shooting occurred on the second floor of the campus’s Natalie Building, on South Yale Avenue.

Here’s what happened when Tulsa police responded to the shooting, according to Capt. Richard Meulenberg, who spoke with The Post on Wednesday night:

• Shortly before 5 p.m. Wednesday, the police received a call about a “man with a rifle” at the hospital.
• Tulsa police responded within minutes and, upon hearing gunfire, activated an “active shooter response.”
• A few officers charged “towards the gunfire” as they entered the hospital.
• The gunfire stopped suddenly as they were making their way into the building, and they came across the victims.
• The officers then found the gunman, who had apparently taken his own life moments before.
• After the shooting, emergency services received another 911 call that contributed to their understanding that the gunman had “intent” in the shooting and did not target people “indiscriminately.” Meulenberg declined to elaborate on the identity of the gunman or the 911 caller.

Multiple shootings were occurring across the United States when a gunman killed at least four people in Tulsa on Wednesday, according to local authorities.

In Los Angeles, a high school student was shot but was in stable condition. In Pittston, Pa., a 20-year-old victim suffered gunshot wounds, local law enforcement officials said. In Akron, Ohio, three people were shot after dozens of rounds were fired, local media reported. In Michigan, a college campus was put under lockdown for several hours after a shooting.

Unlike the Tulsa shooting, those incidents don’t meet the threshold for a mass shooting — four or more people shot or killed, not including the shooter, according to the nonprofit Gun Violence Archive — but the geographical diversity and timing show the omnipresence of shootings that has made the United States an outlier among developed, wealthy nations.

According to the archive, the Tulsa shooting was at least the 20th mass shooting in the United States since 19 children and two teachers were killed at an elementary school in Uvalde, Tex., last week.

The gunman who opened fire Wednesday on the second floor of a medical facility in Tulsa had “intent,” said Capt. Richard Meulenberg of the Tulsa police.

The episode was not a “random shooting” in which the gunman was “indiscriminately [shooting] people with no discernible connection,” he said in a phone interview Wednesday night.

“This particular person had purpose,” he said. “It didn’t seem as though the evidence points to the fact that — he didn’t go in there and randomly pick the second floor of the facility to start shooting people.”

Meulenberg and other officials declined to identify the gunman or the victims on Wednesday, citing the preliminary nature of the investigation and the need to notify the victims’ families. Authorities have said only that the gunman was a 35- to 40-year-old Black man.

“He went in there with intent, and we’re really developing out what the intent was,” Meulenberg said.