Racist gunman kills 3 black people in Florida

FLORIDA, Aug 27 (BBC/AP): A gunman killed three black people in a racially motivated attack then killed himself in Jacksonville, Florida, the city's sheriff said. The man, described as white and in his early 20s, entered a Dollar General store and opened fire, triggering a standoff with police.

Sheriff T K Waters said two men and a woman were killed by the gunman, who wore body armour and left manifestos. Mayor Donna Deegan said it was a "hate-filled crime" driven by racist hatred. The sheriff said the shooter - who has not yet been officially named - carried a lightweight semi-automatic rifle and a handgun.

He is believed to have acted alone and allegedly wanted to kill himself. He lived in Jacksonville's Clay County with his parents and left several messages about his intentions, Sheriff Waters said, including one to his parents and another to the media. The sheriff added that at least one of the guns had a swastika drawn on it.

The FBI has opened a civil rights investigation into the shooting, which it is treating as a hate crime. The attack happened less than a mile from the historically black Edwards Waters University.

Jacksonville Mayor Donna Deegan told local TV channel WJXT: "One shooting is too much but these mass shootings are really hard to take." Florida Governor Ron DeSantis called the gunman a "scumbag" and described the shooting as "horrific".

"He [the gunman] was targeting people based on their race, that is totally unacceptable," said Mr DeSantis, who is competing to be the Republican party's presidential candidate.

"This guy killed himself rather than face the music and accept responsibility for his actions and so he took the coward's way out." The White House said President Joe Biden had been briefed on the shooting.

In a statement provided to the BBC's US partner, CBS News, Dollar General said it was "heartbroken by the senseless act of violence that occurred at our Kings Road store", adding that "supporting our Jacksonville employees and the DG family impacted by this tragedy is a top priority as we work closely with law enforcement".

There have been over 28,000 gun deaths in the US so far this year, according to the Gun Violence Archive website.

The Jacksonville attack comes on the 60th anniversary of the March on Washington and Martin Luther King Jr's famous "I have a dream" speech. Tens of thousands of people gathered in the capital on Saturday to mark the historic milestone in the civil rights movement.

Reached by The Associated Press on Saturday evening, march attendee and Jacksonville native Marsha Dean Phelts said learning of the shooting was "a death blow."

"It hurts," Phelts said by phone while on a charter bus home from Washington. Many fellow bus riders began hearing about the deadly shooting in their community, just before they all boarded to make the long journey back, she said.

"It's a neighborhood, a Black community that we come out of," said Phelts, 79, who is Black. "It's where our college is, Edward Waters University."

LaTonya Thomas, 52, who also was riding a charter bus from the march home to Jacksonville, said she wouldn't allow the shooting to completely dampen her spirits. But she did feel sadness.

"We took this long journey from Jacksonville, Florida, to be a part of history," she said. "When I was told that there was a white shooter in a predominantly Black area, I felt like that was a targeted situation."

The attack on a shopping center in a predominately Black neighborhood will undoubtedly evoke fears of past shootings targeting Black Americans, like the one at a Buffalo, New York, supermarket in 2022, and one at a historic African Methodist Episcopal church in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015.

The Buffalo supermarket shooting, in particular, stands apart as one of the deadliest targeted attacks on Black people by a white lone gunman in U.S. history. Ten people were killed by the gunman, who has been sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

The shooting happened one day before the 63rd anniversary of one of Jacksonville's most notorious racist incidents, "Ax Handle Saturday." A group of Black protesters were conducting a peaceful sit-in at a city park to protest the Jim Crow laws that kept them out of white-owned stores and restaurants.