Four people are dead following a shooting involving the police Tuesday morning in Henderson, Nevada, law enforcement officials said.
About 11 a.m. Tuesday, a dispatcher received a call about a possible shooting at an apartment complex on Stonelake Cove Avenue in Henderson, about 16 miles southeast of Las Vegas, officials said.
The caller reported hearing what sounded like gunshots and seeing "someone with a possible gunshot wound in a nearby doorway," Capt. Jason Kuzik of the Henderson Police Department said at a news conference later Tuesday.
When the police arrived, they found two people who had been shot and "a possible suspect in a parked car that was nearby," Kuzik said. Officers tried to contact this person and it "resulted in an officer-involved shooting," he said.
Asked for the condition of the officers involved in the episode, Kuzik said, "I don't have the information right now." A spokesperson for the department later said no officers had been killed.
The person in the vehicle was among the four people who were killed, Kuzik said. A fifth was taken to the hospital, he said.
At the news conference, Kuzik said that identities of those who were involved in the episode had not been confirmed. He said the police were still investigating the matter, including what had led to the initial shootings.
The killings took place at a three-story building at an apartment complex, The Douglas at Stonelake, that one resident, Amber Belmonte, said was generally quiet.
Belmonte, 38, said in a phone interview that she was looking out a window in her apartment Tuesday morning when she noticed about a half-dozen police vehicles, with sirens blaring, racing into the complex. She went outside to see what was happening.
"I started seeing assault rifles, bulletproof vests," Belmonte, an emergency medical technician who grew up in the city, recalled.
She counted more than two dozen marked police vehicles - in addition to unmarked vehicles, SWAT cars, fire trucks and ambulances.
That's when a burst of gunfire rang out, she said. Belmonte ran back into her apartment. Generally, she said, life is uneventful at the apartment complex, which includes a heated outdoor pool, a bocce court and a hammock farm.
"I imagined the only thing I was going to stress about was the election," she said.
