Two dead in shooting at sports bar, officials say

Two people were killed and eight others wounded in a shooting early Saturday morning at a sports bar near Lancaster, South Carolina, authorities said.

The shooting happened around 2:45 a.m. at the Old Skool Sports Bar & Grill, the Lancaster County Sheriff’s Office said in a news release. The gunman was still at large, it said.

The release said 10 people had been shot, two of them fatally, and one person had been treated for injuries sustained in a fall while trying to flee the club. Four victims were airlifted to medical centers, and another four were treated for noncritical injuries.

“This was a violent incident of huge magnitude that was witnessed by lots of people,” said Barry Faile, the Lancaster County sheriff.

A motive for the shooting was unclear, but Douglas Barfield Jr., a spokesman for the Sheriff’s Office, said Saturday afternoon that the shooting had been the result of a local conflict.

“We have information that our suspect and one of the victims had a beef that has been going on for some period of time,” he said. “We don’t think this was a situation where a random person armed himself and went into a randomly selected location and shot a bunch of unknown people.”

Though the exact number of people present during the shooting was not known, Barfield described the crowd as “elbow to elbow” in the bar just outside of Lancaster, which is about 60 miles north of Columbia, South Carolina.

Barfield said the bar, which is in a commercial area of town, draws large crowds, particularly on weekends. The name of the bar owner was not immediately available, but Barfield said the owner had been there at the time of the shooting.

Cynthia Mcdonald, who owns the property, said Saturday that she had not known about the shooting, and called the bar owner, whose name she could not recall, a “really nice guy.” She said the bar had been there at least 20 years.