Mass shooting again in the United States leaves 2 dead near Washington State music festival

Suspect shot “randomly into the crowd,” at a campground, said Kyle Foreman, a public information officer with the Grant County Sheriff’s Office.

By Edward Era Barbacena 

A mass shooting near a Washington State music festival Saturday night left at least two people dead and three more injured, police said. 

The suspect shot at one point “randomly into the crowd,” at a campground near the Gorge Amphitheater where the Beyond Wonderland electronic dance music festival was taking place, Kyle Foreman, a public information officer with the Grant County Sheriff’s Office told a news conference. 

Officers, he said, responded to a call at 8:23 p.m. local time (11:23 p.m. ET) “to reports of shots fired into the crowd.”

“The shooter then walked away from where the incident happened,” he said. He added that after law enforcement moved into the area “he continued to randomly shoot into the crowd and the suspect was eventually taken into custody.”

Foreman said that two people were killed and three were injured including the suspect.

“We don’t know what the motives were or what the intentions were of the shooter and we’ll have to wait and see if we can find that information out later on,” he said. 

Foreman did not provide any details about the names and ages of the victims and he said he did not know what type of weapons were used.  

The concert in the small city of Gorge, around 149 miles east of Seattle, was going ahead as planned, he said.

Organizers of the Beyond Wonderland festival posted a tweet asking concertgoers to avoid a specific gate to the campground but said there was no danger.

There have been 307 mass shootings in the U.S. in 2023, according to the Gun Violence archive, a nonprofit that tracks incidents and which defines a mass shooting as a single incident in which at least four people — other than the shooter — are shot.