The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel is reporting that 7 people, including the shooter, died at a Sikh temple in suburban Milwaukee Sunday morning.
Details are sketchy, but one of the temple’s committee members describes the gunman as a white male in his 30s. “It’s pretty much a hate crime. It’s not an insider,” he said.
At least seven people were killed, including one shooter, just after 10 a.m. Sunday at the Sikh Temple in Oak Creek, police said.
Four of the dead were inside the temple at 7512 S. Howell Ave. and three of the dead, including a shooter, were outside the temple.
A police SWAT team entered the building before noon and brought uninjured people out of the building at 7512 S. Howell Ave.
They started removing injured people from the temple’s prayer room.
SWAT team members were still sweeping the building about 1 p.m. and an explosion was heard from the building at that time. It was unclear what the explosion was.
The first officer on the scene encountered an active shooter and exchanged fire with him, according to Greenfield Police Chief Bradley Wentlandt who briefed media on the scene.
The shooter went down and is believed to be dead, said Wentlandt, who is acting as police spokesman for the incident. He said authorities had no evidence of a second shooter.
Wentlandt said the officer was hit multiple times, but is expected to survive. He said the officer was a 20-year veteran and “an extremely accomplished tactical officer.” He was taken to Froedtert Hospital in Wauwatosa where he was in surgery just before 2 p.m.
Among those who were shot was the president of the temple, Satwant Kaleka, who was taken to a hospital.
Deepinder Dhaliwal said Kaleka, his brother in law, was shot in the back, but has now been taken to a hospital in St. Francis.
Dhaliwal said his sister, the president’s wife, called him while hiding inside the building with a few other women.
Dick Katschke, a spokesman for the Medical College of Wisconsin, said three adult males were being treated at Froedtert Hospital in Wauwatosa. One of the three was undergoing surgery in the intensive care ward. Another is in an operating room. And the third is being treated in the emergency room, Katschke said.
All three were being treated for gunshot wounds. All are in critical condition, according to Froedtert.
People were in the temple as early as 6:30 a.m. Sunday and many more were arriving for a service that was to begin about 11:30 a.m.
There were reports that children were taken away from the area of the building where the shooting took place after shots were fired.
Someone who sent a text message to a Journal Sentinel reporter shortly before noon said that there were two shooters with children possibly as hostages.
An unknown number of people were wounded. The shooter apparently exchanged fire with the first officer to arrive on the scene and was gunned down after wounding the policeman.
First reports are always wrong.
Don’t rely on them or react to them.
It is time to wait until further information on the shooting and particularly the shooter comes out.
For all we know, this could have as mundane & racially motivated as a drug deal gone bad.
“It’s pretty much a hate crime. It’s not an insider.”
I’m confused.
When the “white” shooter in Aurora, CO killed 12 people that is not a hate crime, but when a “white” shooter kills seven people in a Hindu temple it is a hate crime? Why can it not be a simple crime?
And the guy shot himself, so are we now going to charge the corpse with a crime?
It was not a Hindu temple, but a Sikh temple. Sikhs have been the targets of harassment since 9/11 because Sikh men wear turbans. The hate crime theory is based on the idea that the shooter was an idiot going after “ragheads”.
This version of the hate crime theory is just speculation on my part, because the shooter has not been identified.
Thanks for the correction on Hindu vs. Sikh. That shows the extent to which I really know any other religion out there.
That being said, making assumptions about what the reason for the crime does not address the original question I raised. What about this crime makes it a “hate crime” other than the declaration of one of the Sikhs? If someone at the Aurora shooting declared it a “hate crime” would anyone have taken that person seriously?
A “hate crime?” Tell me when any murder, let alone a multiple murder, is a “love crime.”
It would be one thing if all crimes which actually were “hate crimes,” that is, crimes motivated by political, ethnic, or religious prejudice, were called what they really are. But the “hate crime” category has long been a means for obscuring motivation; e.g., the herculean efforts to conceal the Islamist motivation behind hate crimes such as the Fort Hood shooting.
Since “hate crime” is merely a means for making some crimes more equal than others—playing up a sometimes-bogus motivation in some instances, while obscuring genuine motivation in other instances, it is long past time that the term was consigned to the scrap heap, along with “hate crime” laws.
True. Until conservatives interrogate their own use of the category, there will be no progress towards the presumed goal of treating every victim equally in the media and in the justice system.
In this case, calling some of the shootings hate demeans the violence against the other victims, the police. That can’t be what is really intended, but it is the inevitable consequence of hate crime talk: some are not as important as others.
What major bit has the MSM already reported wrong?
A rhetorical question.
First cop there went for the shooter and ended this. Good for him. If he had secured the perimeter how many more would have died?
We can pretty much assume all we are learning is wrong. What most know about Columbine even today is wrong unless you’ve searched out the corrections. Check out ‘Columbine’ by Dave-Cullen
The question is have they lied about ties to the Tea Party yet?
Since I’m seeing elsewhere that this is already being called an act of “domestic terrorism” by the government I cynically conclude that they have somehow determined that the murderous SOB who committed this vile act was not a member of the Religion of Peace ™.
Otherwise they’d be completely befuddled as to what really happened and why, and we’d likely never really know the true motive.
But it wouldn’t have anything to do with Islam, that’s for sure.
Yes, the domestic terrorism comment makes me afraid that they think this might be the one thing they’ve all been salivating for since the Obama admin started – someone with some kind of tie to the right went loony. I hope to God I’m wrong.
It’s more likely a muslim nut.
No sense speculating – it could be anything: Just plain nuts, white supremacist, convert to Islam, some guy who got fired by a Sikh boss and cracked… the list goes on. Rushing to judgement doesn’t help anyone.
Considering every single lunatic shooter in the last four years has been a liberal, I wouldn’t put it past Obamee to have a false flag operation. Jiverly Wong, George Sodini, Jared Loughner, James Holmes, all liberals, academics, nihilists and leftist thugs.
Now we have a mass killing, already being called a “hate crime” and “Domestic terrorism” that just happens to hit a Sikh Temple in Rep. Paul Ryan’s congressional district, a week or so before Romney is supposed to make his VP decision, where Ryan would be a huge boost to him.
If you’re not seeing the dots here being connected in thick red bloody brushstrokes, you don’t remember Clinton’s “Justice Department” after Oklahoma City and the Atlanta games, and what happened as a direct result of those smokescreens being set up to cover his COMPLETE failure in stopping the first WTC bombing in February 1993, a month after he took office. That should have ended his political career. Instead we got OKC 2 years later and the country rallied around him and his gun control nonsense, then Atlanta a year after that and he won big.
Obamee took that lesson to heart. Pay attention. We’re being played.
I’m sure the brave media will find out that the shooter, a white Christian, regularly ate at Chick-Fil-A.
By the government’s definition, the only people today who commit “domestic terrorism” are white, right-wing extremists. The definition of “right-wing extremist” is, of course, anyone to the right of Howard Zinn. We have few facts, but already the narrative is being spun. Thanks, MSM.
True fact: We don’t know if this guy is a right-wing “hater,” if he had personal issues member of the congregation, or if he’s just nuts. He could also be a Muslim terrorist. They do come in white, you know – as the MSM and other apologists are constantly telling us.
This guy is starting to look like he might be a white supremacist and also like hr might have committed suicide by cop. Nuts do come in all political flavors. This does seem an odd target for most serious racialist hate groups though. Those guys are usually anti-black, anti-semitic and oddly enough frequently pro palestinian. Not sure that hard working straight shooting Sikhs have ever raised much ire from anyone except maybe some Pakistanis and some real extreme fundamentalist Hindus.
I will want to wait though before saying for sure this was really ideologically motivated. This could just was well me some meth-head who decided to end it all by getting the cops to shoot him.
Sikhs have been discriminated against in India, there is (or was) a Sikh separatist movement and there’s been some extreme violence among Sikhs, Hindus, and the Indian government. It’s complicated – I don’t pretend to know the whole story. However, it’s not something we need imported to the United States. As far as I know, American Sikhs and Hindus leave each other be.