Aurora attacker used gun he shouldn’t have owned

AURORA, Ill. — The man who opened fire and killed five co-workers at a suburban Chicago manufacturing plant took a gun he wasn’t allowed to have to a job he must have known he was about to lose.

Right after learning Friday that he was being fired from his job of 15 years at the Henry Pratt Co. in Aurora, Gary Martin pulled out a gun and began shooting, killing the three people in the room with him and two others just outside and wounding a sixth employee before officers began arriving, drawing his attention their way, police said Saturday at a news conference in the city of about 200,000 people roughly 40 miles west of Chicago.

Martin shot and wounded five of the first officers to get to the scene, including one who didn’t even make inside the sprawling warehouse. After that flurry of shots and with officers from throughout the region streaming in to help, he ran off and hid in the back of the building, where officers found him about an hour later and killed him during an exchange of gunfire, police said.

“He was probably waiting for us to get to him there,” Aurora police Lt. Rick Robertson said. “It was just a very short gunfight and it was over, so he was basically in the back waiting for us and fired upon us and our officers fired.”

Like in many of the country’s mass shootings, Friday’s attack was carried out by a man with a violent criminal history who was armed with a gun he wasn’t allowed to have.