YORK, Pa. (AP) — Police officers were killed Saturday after responding to a shooting at Central Pennsylvania Hospital, where the shooter was killed, officials said.
The officer who died in the shooting at UPMC Memorial Hospital in York was identified as Andrew Duarte of West York Borough Police Station. He was responding to a call to mutual aid, the department posted on its Facebook page.
“We all have broken hearts and are saddened by his loss,” West York Borough Manager Sean Mack told The Associated Press.
Officials at UPMC Memorial in York said that gunmen were also killed, but none of the patients were injured.
Law enforcement is located at the facility and is managing the situation, Susan Manco, Vice President of Public Relations for UPMC, said he issued a statement via email.
According to Duarte’s LinkedIn profile, Duarte was a law enforcement veteran who joined the West York Borough police station in 2022 five years later. He explained that he received a “Hero Award” in 2021 from his mother for drunk driving because of his job with a Colorado driving enforcement disorder.
“I have a Type A personality and I like to make everything I do succeed,” his LinkedIn profile said.
The hospital asked employees who were scheduled to work on Saturday to stay home. Family members of patients arriving at the scene will need to report from the hospital to the parking lot of the OSS building across the street, Manco said.
Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro said he was heading to the hospital after being explained to the shooting. He said the hospital was “safe.”
UPMC Memorial is a five-story, 104-bed hospital that opened in 2019 in York of about 40,000 people, known for the founding of York Peppermint Pate in 1940.
The shooting has been part of a wave of gun violence that has swept US hospitals and medical centers in recent years, and has struggled to adapt to the growing threat. Such attacks have made healthcare the most violent in the country, as workers suffer more fatal injuries from workplace violence than workers in other occupations, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It helped to make it one of the areas.
In 2023, a shooter was fatally injured by a state trooper after killing a security guard in the lobby of a state mental hospital in New Hampshire. In 2022, a man killed two workers while he was there to see the child’s birth. That May, a man fired a shot in the waiting room at an Atlanta medical center, killing one woman and injuring four people. And just a month later, the gunman killed his surgeon and three other people. In Oklahoma, Oklahoma, doctors criticized him for continuing pain after surgery.
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