A Montreal police officer was killed in a shootout on Monday that left three dead, and, for almost three tense hours, city residents were urged to shelter in place.
A gunman was killed at the scene, according to police, who urged residents to stay indoors because an armed suspect was believed to be still at large.
Nearby roads, transit stations and businesses closed. In the end, police announced that the lockdown orders were only precautionary.
A civilian was also killed and a female officer was wounded, according to Montreal Police Chief Fady Dagher.
“It’s a tragedy and a nightmare,” he said, adding that investigators had recovered a long gun at the scene.
Dagher said officers had arrived at the scene in the Côte-des-Neiges neighborhood, in northwest Montreal, after receiving reports that a firearm had been seen pointing from a hotel window. When officers arrived, he said, they were fired upon and a gunfight ensued.
At a news conference, Dagher said it was not clear what the gunman’s motive was.
Mordy Aisenstark, a manager at a pizza restaurant near the site of the shooting, said he heard “cracks from the gunshots” at around 11:30 a.m. Monday.
Aisenstark gathered his employees and fled to the back of his store. Later, he saw what appeared to be the shooter, clad in camouflage, lying dead on the ground next to a firearm. After law enforcement arrived, employees of the pizza shop were led to a bathroom in another part of the building and told to shelter in place.
Rosita Lucas, who lives in a two-story house near the shooting, said she heard a series of gunshots from her basement. Coming outside, she saw police officers swarming the area.
“‘Get inside, get inside,’ they were yelling at us,” Lucas recalled. “But then they evacuated the hotel over there, and they were ordering people to get out so quickly that a man who had only one leg didn’t have the time to put it on.”
Nyl Sarmiento, a Filipino immigrant whose family has lived in the area for two decades, said, “Nothing like this has ever happened in this neighborhood before. Crime rates are low here.”
The shooting occurred in an area with new apartment and commercial buildings along a main highway that cuts through Montreal. But the larger area is dotted with modest, two-story attached houses that were long occupied by the local Lubavitcher Hasidic Jewish population, though many Filipino immigrant families have moved into the area in recent years.
“I hope they weren’t targeting Jewish people,” said Zalman Erdvin, who was praying at a local synagogue during the shooting. “They told us we were in lockdown and we had to stay inside for three hours.”
But Aisenstark, who is Jewish, said he did not believe that the shooter was motivated by antisemitism.
“There are two openly Jewish businesses in the area and they didn’t come to target them,” said Aisenstark, referring to his restaurant and a nearby deli.
At the afternoon news conference, Dagher said, “Today, one of ours has fallen in the line of duty.” He added that it had been 24 years since a police officer was last killed in the city.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.