Someone walked into a hospital in Wilmington, Delaware on Tuesday afternoon and shot two people, killing one of them. Then they walked out. As of Tuesday night, police had no idea where they went.
What We Know So Far
According to The Guardian, the shooting was reported around 3:30pm at Wilmington Hospital. Police chief Wilfredo Campos held a press conference confirming that two people were shot, one fatally, and that investigators were still working to figure out how the suspect left the building. That last part deserves a pause. They don't know how a person with a gun, who just shot two people, got out of a hospital.
Campos declined to release the identities of either victim or provide an update on the condition of the person who survived. The hospital lockdown that followed was lifted by Tuesday night, which is either reassuring or deeply unsettling depending on your read of the situation.
The Hospital's Response
ChristianaCare, which operates Wilmington Hospital, said in an emailed statement that it was diverting patients away from its emergency department. The statement described it as "an active police investigation for a possible active shooter" and said the hospital was "taking all appropriate steps to ensure the safety of our patients, caregivers and visitors."
That phrase, "all appropriate steps," is doing a lot of heavy lifting in a sentence that follows the news that someone was just murdered inside the building. To be clear, this is not a criticism of the hospital staff, who are almost certainly as shaken as anyone. It is a criticism of a country that has normalized the kind of violence that requires hospitals to have active shooter protocols in the first place.
A City Already Carrying a Heavy Load
Wilmington is Delaware's largest city, home to about 71,000 people, sitting roughly 25 miles south of Philadelphia. It has long struggled with violent crime relative to its size, and a shooting inside its main hospital is not a storyline that helps a city trying to hold itself together.
The Guardian notes that violence at hospitals has been a persistent problem across the United States. That sentence is almost too calm for what it describes. We are talking about people being shot in places specifically designed to save the lives of people who have been shot. The circularity of that is not ironic. It is a policy failure dressed up as a statistic.
The Suspect Is Still Out There
As of Tuesday night, the suspect remained at large. Police were working to identify who they were looking for and to reconstruct how that person exited the hospital after opening fire. There is no description of a suspect publicly available at this time.
For anyone connected to this case, that is an agonizing place to be. A person is dead inside a hospital. Another is injured. And the person responsible walked out into a Tuesday afternoon and disappeared.
The Dingo Take
Here's the thing about the phrase "violence has been a persistent problem at hospitals across the US" that The Guardian slips into the final paragraphs of this story. It is true. It is also completely insane that it is true. We have somehow arrived at a place where the sentence "people keep getting shot in hospitals" reads as routine contextual background, like mentioning that Wilmington is near Philadelphia.
A hospital is not a neutral setting. It is where you go when your body has already failed you in some way, when you are at your most vulnerable, when the people around you are trying to keep other people alive. A shooting in a hospital is not just a shooting. It is a collapse of one of the last physical spaces in American life that was supposed to be off-limits. And we have normalized it to the point where the story gets a few paragraphs and a note about geography.
Somebody is dead. Somebody is in a hospital bed, presumably the same hospital, recovering from a gunshot wound. And the person who did it walked out the front door, or the back door, or some door that the police are still trying to account for, and is currently somewhere in or around a city of 71,000 people. We will check back when there are answers. Do not hold your breath waiting for the part where anything fundamentally changes.
