A manhunt is in progress following a violent incident at the Figat7th shopping center in downtown Los Angeles, where two security guards were shot by a shoplifting suspect on Monday evening. KTLA reports that the Los Angeles Police Department received calls about the shooting just before 9 p.m., happening at the 700 block of South Figueroa Street.
The guards, while trying to stop the shoplifting suspect, reportedly sustained gunshot wounds—one of them critically injured and now in critical condition. The other guard is in fair condition, both having been admitted to nearby hospitals. According to the Los Angeles Police Department, as detailed by FOX 11, one guard was armed, and returned fire but missed the assailant.
Witness Lucas Williams recounted the harrowing incident in an NBC Los Angeles interview, describing the chaos that unfolded, "By the time I got to the staircase, you just hear two shots go off." Williams added, "Everybody was kind of, you think it’s a firework; you don’t assume the worst immediately. Then, there’s like six more shots pretty quickly. Nobody really looked back because you could kind of hear bullets whisking by us. We just started running up the stairs."
A suspect description released Tuesday morning characterized the shooter as a male between 20 and 30 years old. Eyewitness News provided exclusive footage of the suspect who is still at large. Eyewitness, Judith Conway, told ABC7, "[It was] extremely loud, extremely traumatic." She added, "We all just started running towards the back. We were guided by one of the sales reps, one of the cashiers I should say, at the front. But extremely traumatic, we heard several rounds go off, and we just pretty much ran towards the back and just left our items in the cart, and just tried to do the best that we could to get to safety."
