Four people, including a policeman, two women and an armed man, were killed in a shooting near a hospital in Chicago on Monday in an accident likely to result from a personal dispute, police said.
"This evening three innocent people were killed, and the cowardly shooter who does not deserve to be called," Chicago police spokesman Anthony Gogelmi said in a tweet on Twitter.
"We have four dead, a police officer and two women employees in the hospital and the criminal," Chicago police chief Eddie Johnson told a news conference.
According to the authorities, in the afternoon of Monday, there was an altercation between people who knew each other in the parking lot of the hospital, "Mercy" university, during which a man shot his girlfriend, a hospital employee killed her.
When the police arrived, the murderer took refuge in the hospital where he exchanged fire with the police, killing a second hospital employee and a policeman.
Eventually, the killer was killed during the exchange of fire, but it was not immediately clear to the police whether he committed suicide or was shot dead by one of its members.
"There was shooting (...) in the vicinity of Mercy Hospital, they avoided this area," a spokesman for the Chicago police, the third largest city in the US, told Reuters on Twitter.
