One person was killed and six others were wounded, three of them critically, when gunfire erupted inside a Spirit Halloween store at the Solano Town Center mall in Fairfield, California, at about 8:30 p.m. on Friday, October 30, Fairfield police said. The seasonal store was open and crowded with last-minute Halloween shoppers when the shooting began.
Source: KCRA 3 via Internewscast
Fairfield Police Chief Dan Marshall gave the casualty count at a news conference at the mall. One victim was pronounced dead at the scene, and six others were taken to hospital, including three people who remained in critical condition, the chief said. In a post on Facebook, the Fairfield Police Department said there were seven confirmed victims with gunshot wounds.
What happened inside the store
The shooting happened inside the Spirit Halloween pop-up store, a temporary Halloween retailer occupying the former Best Buy location at Solano Town Center, on Travis Boulevard near Pennsylvania Avenue in Fairfield, in Solano County. The store was busy with families buying costumes and decorations on Halloween eve — the night before Halloween, one of the retailer's busiest days of the year.
Shoppers ran from the building as the shots were fired. One witness told KCRA 3 that his wife, who was inside, heard approximately seven gunshots before people in the store rushed to safety, running, yelling and crying. Police treated the mall as an active scene, and the department's first public message, posted on Instagram, said only that the Fairfield Police Department was working on an active incident at Solano Town Center and that updates would follow on its social media pages.
What police have — and have not — said
As of the police briefing, no one had been detained, and detectives were still working to identify the suspect responsible. Authorities did not release any description of the suspected shooter, did not say whether more than one person may have been involved, and did not disclose a possible motive. No identifying information about any of the victims was provided, police said.
Source: KION Central Coast
"This is still a very active crime scene. Detectives are speaking with witnesses and diligently working to identify the suspect responsible for this horrific shooting." — Fairfield Police Department
The place: a regional mall on the I-80 corridor
Solano Town Center is Fairfield's main enclosed shopping mall, with about 130 stores, serving families across Solano County and the corridor between Sacramento and the San Francisco Bay Area. Fairfield sits directly on Interstate 80, one of California's busiest highway and trucking corridors — a route used daily by Punjabi truckers and by diaspora families travelling between the Bay Area, Sacramento and the Central Valley. A shooting in a crowded family store on this corridor, on one of the busiest family shopping nights of the autumn, is therefore news well beyond the city limits.
Hours earlier the same day, a man was fatally shot inside a store in Madison Heights, Michigan, in a separate incident that Awaaz Punjab has reported separately. Police in neither city have announced any connection between the two shootings, and none should be assumed.
What happens next
Detectives are interviewing witnesses, reviewing evidence from the store and the mall, and working to identify and locate the shooter, police said. The names of the dead and wounded have not been released. Anyone with information about the shooting is being asked to contact Fairfield police investigators. Awaaz Punjab will update this story when police release the suspect description, the victims' identities, or the condition of the three patients in critical condition.