Shooting at Tennis Hall's building in R.I. kills one

PROVIDENCE, R.I. (AP)â€"A shooting at an antiques store in a building owned by the International Tennis Hall of Fame & Museum in Newport on Tuesday left one woman dead and another injured and resulted in the lockdown of several other buildings in the seaside city famed for its mansions and music festivals.

About eight Tennis Hall of Fame employees work on the first and second floors of the building, Hall of Fame CEO Mark Stenning said. They heard at least one gunshot, he said, and saw police officers surround the building. In contact with Stenning by cellphone, the employees moved to the building’s interior and locked themselves in until there was an all-clear by police more than an hour later, he said.

“It was tense for all of us,” he said. “In the beginning, we didn’t know if there was someone on the Hall of Fame campus with a gun.”

Police received a report of gunshots at the building at 10:29 a.m., Lt. William Fitzgerald said. The nearby Canfield House Restaurant’s owner, Gary Wiggins, told The Providence Journal that he saw police officers arrive with their guns drawn and later saw a woman emerge from the building, holding her hand, bleeding and hysterical.

The injured woman was taken to a hospital. Police wouldn’t say whether she was a victim or a shooting suspect.

But the shooting wasn’t random, and it appears the women knew each other, said Fitzgerald, who didn’t release their names.

No one was in custody, but there were no “active shooters” at large in the city, Fitzgerald said.

The shooting happened at Franklin & Co. Interiors, where the other woman was pronounced dead, police said. The company’s website says it’s an antiques and decorations store. No one answered the phone there Tuesday.

Newport, about 30 miles south of the state capital, Providence, is a popular New England summer resort. It’s also home to several festivals, including the Newport Jazz Festival, which has showcased a who’s who of jazz stars since 1954, and the Newport Folk Festival, first held in 1959 and known as the place where Bob Dylan went electric in 1965.

The shooting scene is on a main thoroughfare close to Bellevue Avenue, home to the city’s mansions, which were built by wealthy families that flocked to Newport during the summers from 1865 to 1914, an era known as The Gilded Age. The Tennis Hall of Fame, a popular tourist attraction, acknowledged owning the building, which was among several of its buildings that were locked down.

The main hall, museum and indoor courts were locked down, and on Bellevue Avenue the Hall of Fame temporarily closed a tennis store, Stenning said.

Around noon, all the employees were interviewed by police, Stenning said, and after that he sent them home.