Deadly shooting at Oregon Safeway claims three lives

Three people, including the suspected gunman, are dead following a shooting Sunday night at a Safeway supermarket in Bend, Oregon, according to law enforcement reports. 

Police said they were called to the scene at the Forum Shopping Center in Bend on Sunday night around 7 p.m. after receiving reports of shots fired.

Safeway, an Albertson's banner, did not immediately respond to a WGB request to comment on the shooting on Monday. The grocer operates four Safeway markets in Bend, according to the retailer's website. The store where the shooting took place is currently listed as "temporarily closed."

The gunman was believed to have begun the attack in the store's parking lot before moving inside, the Bend Police Department said in a statement to NBC News. One person was shot inside the entrance. Medics took the victim to a hospital, but the person died, police said.

“Police believe the shooter continued firing through the store, shooting and killing an additional person,” the department told NBC.

Another shooting victim was in an area hospital in good condition, according to a hospital spokesperson.

Sunday's violence at Safeway is the latest in a long, tragic list of recent grocery store shootings. Between January 1, 2020 and May 14, the day of the mass shooting at the Tops Friendly Markets location in Buffalo, New York, there were 448 incidents of gun violence at 12 of the country’s largest grocery chains, resulting in 137 deaths, according to an analysis by advocacy group Guns Down America.  

Prior to that, 78 people were killed in shootings at U.S. grocery stores between 2000 and 2020, former Department of Homeland Security official Bill Flynn said in an FMI seminar on active-assailant preparedness in May. In March 2021, 10 people were killed at King Soopers in Boulder, Colorado; one person was killed at Stop & Shop in West Hempstead, New York in April; one person was killed, and 15 were wounded, at Kroger in Collierville, Tennessee in September 2021.

The shooting at the Tops store on Jefferson Avenue in Buffalo, New York, in May killed 10 people and injured 3.

A shopper at the Bend Safeway said he was checking out Sunday when he heard the gunfire, noting that people began to run out the back emergency exit, telling others to do the same. “We ran to a nearby apartment complex and hid behind some building with about a dozen other people,” he told NBC.

The suspected shooter has been identified as male. It is not clear yet how the shooter died, but police said they did not open fire during their response.

Bend Police Chief Mike Krantz said at a news conference that the investigation of the shooting is still active and ongoing.