Gilroy Garlic Festival
A police officer photographs a car outside the family home of Gilroy Garlic Festival gunman Santino William Legan on Monday, July, 29, 2019, in Gilroy, Calif. Image Credit: AP

Los Angeles: The 19-year-old perpetrator of the latest mass shooting in the United States killed himself, the coroner's office said on Friday, contradicting police accounts that officers had shot the teen dead within a minute.

Santino William Legan was armed with an AK-47-type assault rifle when he opened fire at the popular festival in the town of Gilroy, California last Sunday, killing two children and a 25-year-old man. Twelve people were also wounded in the attack.

247 Mass shootings

in the US this year.

Police said Legan's rampage was stopped thanks to the quick reaction of three officers that responded and gunned him down.

But on Friday, the Santa Clara County medical examiner said Legan had died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound, US media reports said.

Investigators are still trying to determine a motive for the attack.

Mass shootings are a frequent occurrence in the United States, yet despite the scale of the gun violence problem, efforts to address it legislatively have largely stalled at the federal level.

According to Gun Violence Archive, a non-profit, there have been 247 mass shootings in the United States so far this year.