Washington - A woman opened fire with a pistol on Thursday at a warehouse complex where she worked in Maryland, killing three people and wounding three others in the latest shooting attack, police said.
The 26-year-old suspect was identified as Snochia Moseley and died after firing his own head, Harford County Sheriff Jeff Gahler told reporters.
Gahler said that Moseley was a temporary employee of the distribution center of the Rite Aid pharmacy chain in Aberdeen, Maryland.
"We do not have a motivation for this pointless crime," Gahler said, dismissing the "terrorist" clue at first.
The sheriff said the three wounded people are hospitalized and must survive.
However, he did not disclose the names of any of the victims waiting to notify their relatives.
Mass gunfire is common in the United States, but the vast majority involve men, and the Aberdeen incident is a rare example.
The sheriff declared that Moseley was living in Baltimore County and the pistol used in the attack, a 9mm Glock, was registered in his name.
He further stated that she only had one gun and several magazines.
Wave of armed violence
Gahler described that the woman arrived to work around 9am local time (10am in Brasilia) and the attack began minutes later. Of those hit, there were some inside and others outside the Rite Aid deposit.
Police officers responded five minutes after the shooting report, and the sheriff said no shots were fired by the officers.
"It was a real bombardment - I am not exaggerating - from 20 to 30 police officers who arrived, and then the ambulances and everything else," a victim told WBAL-TV.
Andre Cedeno, 30, told the Baltimore Sun that his sister, Lea, was at Rite Aid and he ran away from where he works after hearing about the shooting.
"She was in a panic," Cedeno said, and hid in the bathroom. "It's crazy that people do not respect life."
The incident is the latest in a wave of gun violence that hits schools and workplaces in the United States, where the right to bear arms is protected by the constitution.
Attacks by women, however, are extremely rare, accounting for less than 5 percent of the total recorded, according to police and academic authorities.
Thursday's attack came five months after an Iran-born animal rights activist killed three people before she killed herself at California's YouTube headquarters.
Maryland had gloomy headlines in June when five employees of the Capital-Gazette newspaper died after a gunman invaded the newsroom in Annapolis.
The man who, according to police, was responsible for the massacre, stalked the paper's employees for years because of an article about criminal charges against him.
