One woman pronounced dead at the scene and four people taken to hospital after separate shootings in Texan city

A woman was killed and four other people shot in an incident in Texas that was initially feared to be the work of a gunman attacking in various locations.

Austin police were called to two incidents in the city’s historic Sixth Street entertainment district within minutes of each other in the early hours of Sunday, prompting fears that a person was firing randomly.

The police put out a warning of an “active shooter incident downtown”, telling people to stay away from the area. At a press conference later, however, the Austin police chief of staff, Brian Manley, said that had been “based on the information we had at that time”.

“It was a very chaotic scene,” Manley said. “A lot of people running in different directions with all the gunshots coming out.”

At 2.17am, police received a call saying a woman had been shot in Sixth Street and seven minutes later a call saying an individual had been assaulted with shots fired in Trinity Street, a few blocks away.

At the press conference, Manley said: “At this time we do not believe nor are we classifying this as an active shooter. What we had was two separate incidents that occurred in very close proximity to each other both in location and time that made us initially believe it was an active shooter.”

Austin Police Dept (@Austin_Police) Active shooter incident downtown, multiple victims. Stay away from downtown. Media: Dont call for updates at this time, more to follow. PIO6

He said the Sixth Street incident was believed to have begun after a disturbance between two individuals led one of them to shoot into the crowd.

A woman, believed to be in her 20s, died on the scene. Four other people were shot, three of them women believed to be in their 30s, who were taken to University Medical Center Brackenridge. The other person injured, a man, refused to be taken to hospital. Commander Mike Benavides of Austin-Travis County emergency services said the women had serious but non-life threatening injuries.

The gunman, believed to be a light-skinned black or Hispanic male, escaped,Manley said.

“As officers arrived, as you can imagine with this being shortly after 2am and the large crowds that we have on Sixth Street at this time, all the individuals leaving the bars, it was a very chaotic scene, a lot of people running in different directions with all the gunshots running out,” he said.

He praised the police response as “fantastic”, saying they were on the scene immediately.

Austin police chief Art Acevedo said in a statement that his department was working to identify and arrest the person responsible for the shootings in Sixth Street, and urged people who had video of the shooting or the aftermath to send it to police via email.

Manley did not rule out that a suspect might be one of the people transported to the hospital.

“We have multiple individuals, witnesses, that we are currently interviewing,” Manley said. “We had one individual who was initially noted as a person of interest, however that person’s status at this point is undetermined.”

Manley said the second incident involved a dispute in a car park in which a man pulled out and fired a weapon before being “taken down” by other people who observed the disturbance.

The gunman was taken to hospital for injuries incurred while he was disarmed but no one else was injured. Benavides said the gunman was believed to be in his 20s and had not suffered life-threatening injuries.

Manley appealed for people to forward any video they had of the Sixth Street incident to police.

A video posted on Twitter purporting to be from the scene of the shooting showed people running and screaming after shots were heard. Sam Vedamanikam, who posted the footage, tweeted: “I think it was a fight. Police ran immediately into it. Props to the police. We ran to 7th Street to get away from 6th.”







• This article was amended on 1 August 2016. An earlier version described Brian Manley as Austin’s police chief. He is the police chief of staff.