KANSAS CITY, Mo. -- The chaos began with police finding an elderly woman dead and her car missing. It ended when officers fatally shot the man driving the car - but only after he fired on a police officer and later people at a shopping center, killing two of them.
Police trying to make sense of the four deaths were reviewing security footage and interviewing hundreds of witnesses to the shooting Sunday outside a Target store inside Ward Parkway Center in south Kansas City, police spokesman Tony Sanders said.
Target employee Cassie Bradshaw, 19, of Kansas City, was in a break room with two other people when they first heard shots. Then, her co-workers saw a man in his 50s with a rifle "shooting everywhere," she said.
"It sounded like maybe firecrackers at first but then they got louder and louder and louder, and it sounded like someone shooting a gun," she said.
Police found the elderly woman Sunday afternoon after they went to a home because relatives hadn't seen her for days. Her car was spotted later in the day at a gas station by an officer, who pulled the driver over and was shot in the arm, police said.
The officer, whose wound was not life-threatening, returned fire and shattered the window of the gunman's car.
The car took off and reports began arriving about 10 to 15 minutes later of shots fired at the shopping center. The man pulled into a parking space and fired at the cars on either side of him, killing two people, authorities said. He fired more shots, wounding at least two people, then went inside the mall, Sanders said.
"Everybody was leaving the mall when the officers ran inside," Sanders said. "They confronted the man and after confronting him, shot and killed him."
Sanders said he could not confirm witnesses' accounts of hearings shots inside the mall.
Police did not say how the elderly woman died, or if the gunman was a suspect in her death. But they did say they believed the events were connected.
The mall, one of the city's busiest shopping centers, was shut down and officers went through each store to see if anyone else might have been involved, Sanders said. The gunman and victims' names were not immediately released, and conditions of the wounded were not available.
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