One man was killed and five other people were wounded during a shooting inside a restaurant in Nashville, Tennessee, on Sunday afternoon, as many in the city celebrated Easter, police said.
The shooting at about 3pm in Nashville’s Salemtown neighborhood began within minutes of the male suspect’s arrival at the restaurant with a woman, authorities said.
The suspect and the man who died got into an argument that “significantly escalated within moments”, a metropolitan Nashville police department spokesperson, Don Aaron, said during a news conference at the scene.
Police later identified the man who was killed as 33-year-old Allen Beachem. The conditions of the other victims were not immediately released.
Police identified a 46-year-old suspect and the car used to flee the scene with images from security video provided by the restaurant. As a search continued on Sunday for the suspect, police posted photos of the shooting scene on social media, including an image of a man pointing a handgun.
“The gunman was the only one who brandished a pistol. This was not a shootout, if you will – this was one person who decided to pull a gun based on an altercation occurring with another man and then he fired multiple shots,” Aaron said.
There was a panic inside the restaurant as customers tried to escape, the police commander Anthony McClain added.
“Some people did try to resist the gunman,” McClain said. “It was just mass chaos.”
Investigators were at local hospitals on Sunday interviewing victims to determine exactly what happened, Aaron said.
“It may have been something as simple as one person invading another person’s space,” he said.
The violence in Nashville was one of at least four mass shootings on Sunday across the US – and among nearly 95 mass shootings nationwide so far this year, according to the Gun Violence Archive.
The nonpartisan archive defines a mass shooting as one in which four or more victims are injured or killed.
Constant mass shootings in the US have prompted many to call for more substantial gun control, though few if any meaningful measures have been enacted.