Police examine more than 30 crime scenes after Derrick Bird shoots dead 12 and injures 25 before taking own life
Twelve people were confirmed dead and three were fighting for their lives tonight after a taxi driver went on the rampage in the UK’s worst shooting incident since the Dunblane massacre.
Derrick Bird, 52, shot dead at least one colleague before driving through rural west Cumbria, firing indiscriminately at people in towns, villages and country roads before killing himself.
Twenty-five were injured during the three-and-a-half hour killing spree which paralysed the county as desperate police, hunting him on the ground and by air, ordered a lockdown.
Tonight the Queen said she was “deeply shocked” by the shootings and shared the nation’s “grief and horror”.
Cumbria police said it was too early to “really understand the motivation” behind the attacks, described as the “most exceptional and challenging incident” the tiny force had ever dealt with. Tonight they were examining 30 crime scenes.
The terror, which started in the harbour town of Whitehaven at 10.30am, ended only when the gunman’s body was found in a wooded copse outside the tiny hamlet of Boot in the Lake District at 1.40pm. Two guns were recovered.
There were unconfirmed reports that Bird, from Rowrah, near Frizington, a divorced father and grandfather with two sons and described as a quiet man, had rowed with colleagues on the taxi rank the previous night.
One friend, Peter Leder, told CNN that Bird had said to him the night before: “You won’t see me again.”
According to one woman in Whitehaven Bird “shook them [his colleagues] by the hands one by one and said there’s going to be a rampage in this town tomorrow … they just laughed and didn’t take him seriously”. One relative reported that Bird had been bequeathed “a load of guns” in his father’s will.
The home of a local solicitor, Kevin Commons, who had been in touch with Bird, was tonight cordoned off by police.
Neighbours and friends described Bird, known locally as “Birdy” as a friendly, even-tempered man – the kind of neighbour with a ready smile who would also stop for a chat. Their shock at his unprovoked shooting spree is complete.
Ryan Dempsey, a neighbour, had known Bird since he was 10. “He was a very easy-going sort of fellow – never walked past without saying hello. The last time I saw him was the night before last, and he was just as happy as before. He waved through the window, nodded and smiled, and the next thing I hear is this tragedy.”
Sue Matthews, a telephonist at ʌB Taxis in Whitehaven, said: “To be honest, he was a quiet fellow. I am in absolute shock. It is like watching something from America.”
Last week Bird’s son Graeme and his wife Victoria, who lived only a few miles from his shabby cottage, had a son.
Bird’s first victim was named locally as Darren Rewcastle, a fellow taxi driver. Witnesses said he then drove through Whitehaven with a gun hanging out of his car window, before heading south to Egremont, Gosforth and Seascale.
Cumbria’s deputy chief constable, Stuart Hyde, said police had yet to establish whether it was a premeditated or random attack. “This has shocked the people of Cumbria – and around the country – to the core,” he said. “Current indications are that 12 people have died, plus Derrick Bird. And a number of people are also receiving treatment in hospital.”
It was a “terrifying and horrific incident”, he said. “Our thoughts go out to all the family and friends and colleagues of those killed or injured in this tragedy.”
David Cameron pledged to do everything possible to help communities “shattered” by the killings. “The government will do everything it possibly can to help the local community and those affected,” he told MPs.
It is the third tragedy to hit west Cumbria in six months, following the devastating floods last year and the deaths of three people, including two schoolchildren, in a coach crash on the A66 last week.
The lockdown saw shops, offices and even the Sellafield nuclear reprocessing plant close their doors while the gunman was on the loose. Helicopters and armed officers from other police forces were brought in to help in the hunt.
Many of the injured were taken to the West Cumberland hospital in Whitehaven, where a major incident was declared and routine operations cancelled, and to hospitals in Carlisle and Newcastle-upon-Tyne.
Bird’s spree is the biggest mass shooting since Thomas Hamilton killed 16 children and an adult at Dunblane primary school in March 1996, before killing himself.
The area’s Labour MP, Jamie Reed, said it was the type of area where people keep their doors unlocked. “Things like this don’t happen around here,” he said, visibly shaken. “What is happening is completely beyond our experience.”
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