The Rocky Mountain Collegian

Issue date: 3/11/09 Section: News

Media Credit: Associated Press Family members of victims of a shooting rampage comfort each other outside a home on Pullum Street in Samson, Ala. on Tuesday, March 10, 2009. A coroner says the suspect in a shooting rampage that killed at least 10 people in south Alabama began his day of bloodshed by burning down his mother's house where officials found her body. (AP Photo/The Dothan Eagle, Jay Hare)

SAMSON, Ala. (AP) - A gunman killed at least nine people on a terrifying rampage across two Alabama counties Tuesday, burning down his mother's home, killing members of his own family on their porch and shooting apparent strangers as he drove by, authorities said. He then fatally shot himself.

Police were investigating shootings in at least four different locations in three neighboring communities, all of which were believed to be the work of a single gunman named Michael McLendon. Investigators declined to comment on a motive for the shootings, in which at least four other people were injured, including a child.

The afternoon of bloodshed began when McLendon burned down the house in Kinston where he lived with his mother, Lisa McLendon, according to Coffee County Coroner Robert Preachers. Officials located Lisa McLendon's body inside the house, but they had not been able to get inside the still-burning house to determine a cause of death or whether she was a 10th victim of her son's killing spree.

He then headed about 12 miles southeast to Samson, in Geneva County, where he shot and killed five people - four adults and a child - at a home. He killed one person each in two other homes.

The identities of all the victims were unknown, but Preachers said they included other members of the shooter's family.

"He started in his mother's house," Preachers said. "Then he went to Samson and he killed his granny and granddaddy and aunt and uncle. He cleaned his family out."

"We don't know what triggered it," Preachers added.

McLendon also shot at a state trooper's car, striking the vehicle seven times and wounding the trooper with broken glass.

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