13 dead in D.C. shooting

A gunman who had been discharged by the Navy in 2011 after what an official described as a “pattern of misconduct” staged a two-hour rampage Monday at the Washington Navy Yard, killing 12 people before being shot to death by law enforcement officials.

Officials using fingerprint records identified the man as Aaron Alexis, 34, a Navy contractor, whose arrival on the base shortly before 8:15 a.m. set off hours of terror and mayhem.

More than 3,000 workers were locked down in their offices while police officers, Navy security guards and FBI agents fought a running gun battle with the shooter, who was armed with an AR-15 assault rifle, a shotgun and a handgun. Investigators think Alexis began the assault with only the shotgun and that he took the AR-15 and handgun from people he shot, a U.S. official said.

Officials said Alexis got to the fourth floor of the headquarters building of the Naval Sea Systems Command and started shooting down into an atrium that includes an employee cafeteria.

“I heard pop, pop, pop and then maybe three seconds later, four more shots,” said Patricia Ward, who was in the building when the shooting started.

The 53-year-old logistics management specialist in the Sea Systems Command was in the lobby using an ATM when she heard the shots. A security guard with a gun drawn told workers to run, she said.

“I thought of my family and I just ran,” Ward said.

The dead ranged in age from 46 to 73, Washington Mayor Vincent Gray said at a late-night news conference. Officials have begun notifying families of the dead but have not released their names. All were civilian Navy employees or contractors.

Officials said they had no indication the incident was linked to terrorist groups but had no certainty about what the motive might have been.

An official close to the investigation, however, said federal authorities were looking into the possibility that Alexis had a dispute with his employer, a company called The Experts, which works as a subcontractor to a division of Hewlett-Packard.

The official said Alexis was “particularly upset over a pay or salary dispute” from work he had performed in Asia for the company. Alexis believed the company had shorted him on his wages for work he had performed in Japan, the official said.

Howard Clabo, Hewlett-Packard senior vice president for global communications, said the company was cooperating with the investigation. A spokesman for The Experts said the firm also was cooperating.

The FBI appealed for the public’s help to learn about Alexis.

“No piece of information is too small,” Valerie Parlave, assistant director in charge of the FBI’s Washington field office, said at a news conference. “We are looking to learn everything we can about his recent movements, his contacts and his associates.”

Alexis, a New York City native who had recently moved to Washington from Fort Worth, had a record that included at least two arrests in the last decade involving firearms, but neither seemed to presage violence on the scale of Monday’s attacks.

One of the previous incidents occurred in 2010 in Fort Worth, when Alexis shot through the ceiling of his apartment. Tarrant County prosecutors said Monday they had not prosecuted the case after Alexis told them the gun had discharged accidentally while he was cleaning it.

In the other case, Seattle police arrested Alexis in 2004 after he purportedly shot out the tires of another man’s vehicle in what he later described to detectives as an anger-fueled “blackout.” Detectives spoke with Alexis’ father, who, according to the police department blog, told police Alexis had “anger management problems.”

A Navy official said that Alexis, who had served for four years as an aviation electrician’s mate, had multiple disciplinary infractions before his discharge in January 2011. But the incidents were not serious enough to prevent him from getting a job as an information technology worker on a Navy contract that involved equipment used by the Marine Corps Intranet network.

Parlave of the FBI said Alexis’ job as a contractor gave him “legitimate access” to the base and that he had used a valid pass to enter. Military personnel and contractors can access the grounds without being searched if they have a valid pass, Navy officials said.

A federal law enforcement supervisor briefed on the investigation said an official Navy employee ID card was found near the scene of the shooting but that it apparently did not belong to Alexis. Instead, officials said it belonged to a different person who had been “let go or transferred” from his job recently.

Whether Alexis used that card and how he may have obtained it remained under investigation, officials said.

Those injured in the shooting included three people, one of them a District of Columbia police officer shot in the leg, who were treated at MedStar Washington Hospital Center and were expected to recover, hospital officials said. Five other people had suffered from non-shooting injuries, including stress, Mayor Gray said.

“We know these kinds of things have happened in other places,” said Gray, “but nothing like this here in the District of Columbia.”

President Obama, decrying the “cowardly” act of violence, called the victims patriots who knew the dangers of serving abroad but “faced unimaginable violence that they wouldn’t have expected here at home.”

“We are confronting yet another mass shooting, and today it happened on a military installation in our nation’s capital,” he said from the White House.

The area surrounding the Navy Yard on southeast Washington’s Anacostia River front was on edge throughout much of the day, as helicopters hovered, evacuating the wounded, assisting in the search for Alexis and taking part in a hunt for two other men whom officials had initially thought were also potential gunmen.

Several major highways and mass transit stops near the base were closed for hours while police searched. Reagan National Airport closed briefly during the morning to avoid the possibility of air traffic interfering with helicopters.

Late in the day, police cleared one of the men. At night, they said they had stopped looking for the second man, saying they had “no corroborating evidence” of his existence.

Law enforcement officials emphasized that they believed Alexis had acted alone. “We do now feel comfortable that we have the single and sole person responsible for the loss of life,” said Washington Police Chief Cathy Lanier.

The shooting occurred at the Navy’s oldest land base -- a historic 41-acre installation that was a frequent stop for President Lincoln during the Civil War. After Lincoln’s assassination, eight of the conspirators who plotted his death were brought to the yard, as was the body of his killer, John Wilkes Booth.

The rampage summoned memories of a similar assault in Texas, coming just weeks after Army psychiatrist Nidal Malik Hasan was sentenced to death for the 2009 killing of 13 people and wounding of more than 30 others at Ft. Hood.

The most recent mass shooting, taking place just a mile and a half from the Capitol, could revive the debate in Congress over gun control, although there seems little appetite among most lawmakers to revisit the issue -- and no evidence of anyone departing from previously held positions.

“These repeated incidents demand our attention,” said Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.). A spokesman for the National Rifle Assn. said the organization would not comment on the shooting.

It was left to the doctor overseeing the care of the wounded to voice frustration over the mass shootings of the last several years.

“There’s something evil in our society that we as Americans have to work to try and eradicate,” Dr. Janis Orlowski, chief medical officer at MedStar Washington Hospital Center, told reporters.

“There’s something wrong here when we have these wall-to-wall shootings,” she said. “I’d like you to put my trauma center out of business.”

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Brian Bennett, Ken Dilanian, Alexei Koseff and Becca Clemons in the Washington bureau and Times staff writers Molly Hennessy-Fiske in Fort Worth, Tina Susman in New York and Richard Winton in Los Angeles contributed to this report.