A man armed with a pistol and carrying zip ties entered a Pennsylvania hospital’s intensive care unit Saturday and took staff members hostage before he was killed by police in a shootout that also left an officer dead, authorities said.
Three workers at UPMC Memorial hospital, including a doctor, a nurse and a custodian, and two other officers were shot and wounded in the attack, York county district attorney Tim Barker said. A fourth staffer was injured in a fall.
Gunfire erupted after officers went to engage the shooter, whom Barker identified as Diogenes Archangel-Ortiz, 49. He said Archangel-Ortiz was holding at gunpoint a female staff member who had her hands bound with zip ties when police opened fire.
“This is a huge loss to our community,” Barker said at a news conference following the shooting. “It is absolutely clear, and beyond any and all doubt, that the officers were justified in taking their action using deadly force.”
Barker added that while the investigation is in its early stages, it appears Archangel-Ortiz had previous contact with the hospital’s ICU earlier in the week for “a medical purpose involving another individual” – and he intentionally targeted the workers there.
No one answered the door on Saturday at an address in York believed to be that of Archangel-Ortiz.
The officer who died was identified as Andrew Duarte of the West York borough police department.
“We all have broken hearts and are grieving at his loss,” West York borough manager Shawn Mauck told the Associated Press.
Duarte was a law enforcement veteran who joined the department in 2022 after five years with the Denver Police Department, according to his LinkedIn profile. He described receiving a “hero award” in 2021 from Mothers Against Drunk Driving for his work in impaired driving enforcement for the state of Colorado.
“I have a type A personality and like to succeed in all that I do,” his LinkedIn profile said.
Duarte also worked as a patrol officer in Denver, was highly regarded for his work and was close friends with other officers, the department there said in a statement.
The Pennsylvania governor, Josh Shapiro, said he met on Saturday evening with Duarte’s parents and fellow officers who were wounded.
“Their willingness to run toward danger helped save the lives of others,” Shapiro said on the social platform X. “I’m grateful to them and all law enforcement who answered the call today in York.”
At a makeshift memorial on the front steps of the West York Borough Police Department, Linda Shields dropped off roses Saturday and dabbed tears as she thought of her son, a police officer in Maryland.
“He was so young,” Shields said of Duarte. “It makes no sense at all.”
Shapiro called the attack on police and health care workers “the act of a coward”.
UPMC Memorial is a five-story, 104-bed hospital that opened in 2019 in York, a city of about 40,000 people known for its creation of York Peppermint Patties in 1940.
Saturday’s attack was one of more than 35 mass shootings in the US so far this year, according to the Gun Violence Archive, a nonpartisan resource which defines a mass shooting as one in which four or more victims are wounded or killed.
The perennially high numbers of mass shootings in the US have prompted many in the country to call for more substantial gun control, though Congress has been mostly unwilling or unable to enact such measures.
The attack on Saturday was also part of a wave of gun violence in recent years that has swept through US hospitals and medical centers, which have struggled to adapt to the growing threats. Such attacks have helped make healthcare one of the nation’s most violent fields, with workers suffering more nonfatal injuries from workplace violence than workers in any other profession, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
In 2023, a shooter killed a security guard in the lobby of New Hampshire’s state psychiatric hospital before being fatally shot by a state trooper. An Oregon hospital security guard was shot to death while protecting a maternity ward from an attacker that year, too.
In 2022, a man killed two workers at a Dallas hospital while there to watch his child’s birth. In May of that year, a man opened fire in a medical center waiting room in Atlanta, killing one woman and wounding four. And just one month later, a gunman killed his surgeon and three other people at a Tulsa, Oklahoma, medical office because he blamed the doctor for his continuing pain after an operation.
