Disgruntled worker opens fire on factory colleagues

An employee angry at being dismissed from a furniture factory in northern Indiana opened fire on his colleagues, killing one and injuring half a dozen others before turning his weapon on himself, police said.

An employee angry at being dismissed from a furniture factory in northern Indiana opened fire on his colleagues, killing one and injuring half a dozen others before turning his weapon on himself, police said.

The attack, the most spectacular to hit the headlines in the United States for several months, caused pandemonium at the Nu-Wood Decorative Millwork factory and surrounding buildings in an industrial park on the outskirts of Goshen, about 100 miles east of Chicago.

Armed police units swarmed to the scene shortly after the shooting began, at the start of the afternoon shift, taking up positions on roofs and in alleys and helping the occupants of other offices and school buildings to evacuate the area.

According to one Nu-Wood employee who escaped the building while the gunman was still inside, the assailant had been fired at lunchtime after a fight with a fellow employee and vowed to return with a gun.

There were no details immediately available on the sequence of events, but within two hours four people had been evacuated by police car or ambulance to hospitals. Unconfirmed reports suggested that they had been hit by fire from an automatic weapon.

When police finally gave the all-clear and swarmed into the Nu-Wood building, they found two bodies, one of which was the assailant's, and five people they described as "walking wounded". The assailant, they said, had apparently killed himself.

Initially there were fears of much greater casualties, and as many as 50 police and rescue service vehicles were seen lined up outside the building to treat the wounded as they came out.

Mass shootings – in factories, offices, restaurants and high schools – have been a regular feature of modern American life. A year ago, seven people were killed at an Internet company in Massachusetts. A year before that, a former employee at a Seattle shipyard gunned down two of his former colleagues and wounded two others, and a Xerox worker in Honolulu killed seven of his co-workers.