SAMSON, Ala., March 10 (UPI) -- A gunman killed at least nine people in a small town and one more elsewhere in the worst mass homicide in Alabama history, police said.

The man died in a confrontation with police after wounding a sheriff's deputy, the Dothan Eagle reported.


"It is truly one of the most horrific things that anyone in law enforcement can remember in Alabama," Col. J. Christopher Murphy, director of the Alabama Department of Public Safety, told The New York Times. "We're still getting victims coming in."

Nine of the dead were in Samson, a town of about 2,000 people a few miles north of the Florida Panhandle, the Eagle said. They included the wife and child of a sheriff's deputy.

The tenth was in Kinston, an even smaller town about 10 miles northeast of Samson.

Many of the dead were in one house in Samson.

"You want to talk about a horrific scene," Alina Knowles, a neighbor, told the Eagle. "You see what I saw. I went to get the baby. There was blood all over that porch. The baby was covered in her mother's blood."

As the man fled east along Route 52, a highway that roughly parallels the state line, police officers tried to stop him, rear-ending his car. He shot and wounded Geneva Police Chief Frankie Lindsey, the Eagle said.

The man took his own life in the parking lot of Reliable Products in Geneva after firing at police.