Three people were dead, including a suspected gunman, after a shooting at a Super 8 hotel in Minnesota, police said.
An employee at the hotel, located in Cloquet near Minnesota highway 33, called 911 on Monday to report that a fellow worker “looked like she’d been attacked,” according to the Cloquet Police Department. When officers arrived on the scene around 6:30 p.m., they discovered a 22-year-old woman suffering from a gunshot wound.
She was rushed to nearby St. Luke’s Hospital, where she was pronounced dead, police said.
Officers found another victim, identified only as a 35 year-old-man, dead from a gunshot wound inside a car parked at the hotel.
The grisly discoveries prompted a shelter-in-place order for residents in the surrounding area.
Chris Korby was at work at an Arby’s just across the highway when the alert came through. He said his supervisor told them to close the lobby but requested that they keep the drive-thru running.
“It’s a little nerve-wracking definitely when your life is on the line and you don’t know who it is,” Korby told the Duluth News Tribune. “So they could definitely walk in at any time or come to the drive-thru, you don’t know.”
The emergency order was called off around 8:30 p.m., after police said they’d located the body of the suspect on the grounds of the hotel with an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound.
Surveillance video from the hotel confirmed he was the shooter, police said. Police did not provide his name, but confirmed he was a 32-year-old man.
Neither of the victims have been identified.
A motive for the deadly violence remained unclear on Tuesday and an investigation is ongoing.
