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NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston was evacuated Friday after shots were fired there
:: 21 April, 2007
A building at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston was evacuated Friday after shots were fired there, authorities said. The gunman was thought to be barricaded in the building, but later in the afternoon, emergency workers were seen wheeling a stretcher inside.
NASA security personnel as well as Houston police responded to "a report about a person with a weapon" at Building 44 on the space center's campus, agency spokeswoman Lynette Madison told MSNBC.com.
NASA alerted workers to evacuate the building, and police surrounded the facility. The suspect — reportedly a contract worker for NASA — remained inside, a police spokesman said. "We have one suspect, a white male, approximately 50 to 60 years old, with one weapon, that being a handgun," Houston Police Capt. Dwayne Ready told reporters.
Ready said witnesses provided the description of the suspect and told authorities that two shots were fired inside the building. He declined to speculate on the gunman's motive.
KPRC, NBC's affiliate in Houston, reported that the gunman was barricaded in a second-floor office, but Ready declined to provide detailed information about the gunman's situation or his identity. Contact had not yet been established with the gunman, Ready said. He could not say whether anyone else was with the gunman, or whether anyone was unaccounted for. He even declined to confirm whether the gunman was alive or dead.
After Ready spoke, aerial views of the scene showed an ambulance pulling up near the building. Sources told NBC News that emergency workers were going in to treat an injured person. SWAT team members were also going in and out of the building.
The gunman worked for a subsidiary of Jacobs Engineering Group, a contractor for NASA, company sources told KPRC. John Prosser, executive vice president for finance and administration at Jacobs Engineering Group, confirmed to MSNBC.com that he had received those reports — but he could not provide any further information.
The Tennessee-based subsidiary, Jacobs Sverdrup, does "very extensive" work for NASA, including computer and engineering services, Prosser said.
Initially, NASA advised employees to "shelter in place until further notice." Later in the afternoon, employees were told they could leave the center grounds when their normal workday was over.
Space Center Intermediate School, which is adjacent to the campus, was placed temporariliy in lockdown mode as a precaution — but the children and staff were eventually allowed to go home.
Authorities set up a command center and lights outside the building, potentially setting the stage for a long vigil and negotiations.
Building 44 is a two-story communications and engineering office building set off in a relatively isolated area of Johnson Space Center's 1,600-acre campus, some distance from the Mission Control building.
In an advisory, NASA said Building 44 "primarily consists of office space and a few labs to support tracking of spacecraft, such as the international space station and the space shuttle when it's flying."
NASA spokeswoman Eileen Hawley told reporters that the incident caused "absolutely no disruptions to center operations."
A Soyuz craft is due to bring U.S. and Russian astronauts along with billionaire space passenger Charles Simonyi back to Earth on Saturday, but that operation is being managed from Russian Mission Control near Moscow, with the landing targeted for Kazakhstan. Johnson Space Center is also preparing for a space shuttle mission as early as June 8.
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