Skip to footer

Suspect armed with gun and hatchet shot dead at Tenn. theater, police say

The suspect, who was not named, used pepper spray on an audience inside the Carmike Hickory 8 theater in suburban Nashville.

|
Mark Zaleski/AP
An officer stands in front of the Carmike Hickory 8 movie theater following a shooting Wednesday, Aug. 5, 2015, in Antioch, Tenn. A suspect wielding a hatchet and a gun inside the Nashville-area movie theater died after exchanging gunshots with a SWAT team that stormed the theater, police said.
  • By Erik Schelzig Associated Press

| Antioch, Tenn.

A suspect wielding a hatchet, gun and pepper spray inside a Nashville-area movie theater died after exchanging gunshots with a SWAT team as he tried to escape through the theater's rear door, police said Wednesday.

The suspect, whom police identified as a 51-year-old white local man, was armed with a gun and a hatchet or an ax during a showing of "Mad Max" at the Carmike Hickory 8 theater in Antioch, said Don Aaron, a spokesman for Metro Nashville police.

Aaron said the suspect was carrying a backpack on his chest and was wearing a surgical mask, possibly to protect himself from the pepper spray he unleashed in large amounts.

He said three people were blasted with the spray and treated. One of those people also had a superficial wound that could have been caused by a hatchet, said fire department spokesman Brian Haas. No one was taken to a hospital.

The only person shot was the suspect, Aaron said. A bomb squad was checking the backpack to make sure it did not contain any explosives and Aaron said people in the immediate vicinity might hear a loud boom if they had to detonate it.

Aaron said an officer came into the theater, where at least 20 people were present, seconds was fired upon by the suspect. The officer shot back, then backed off. About two dozen gunshots could be heard in a 10-second period in raw video footage posted online by WKRN-TV.

Eric Vale, 32, an Uber driver, told The Tennessean newspaper that he was dropping off passengers in the theater's parking lot when he heard gunshots.

He described it as "utter chaos."

"I just couldn't believe this was happening again," he said.

The theater in Antioch is near Global Mall, a shopping center in a middle-class neighborhood.

The latest shooting comes about two weeks after a gunman opened fire inside a movie theater in Lafayette, Louisiana, during a screening of the film "Trainwreck." Police said John Russell Houser killed two people and wounded nine others before fatally shooting himself.

Also Wednesday, jurors in Colorado were preparing to decide whether James Holmes should be executed for murdering 12 people and trying to kill 70 others in a 2012 attack at a Batman movie.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.
editor@csmonitor.com
Subscribe
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

QR Code to Suspect armed with gun and hatchet shot dead at Tenn. theater, police say
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/2015/0805/Suspect-armed-with-gun-and-hatchet-shot-dead-at-Tenn.-theater-police-say
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe