Two sheriff’s deputies in North Florida are dead after a gunman walked up to the window of a Chinese restaurant where they were eating on Thursday afternoon and shot them, the authorities said.
The shooting occurred around 3 p.m. Eastern time in Trenton, Florida, about 30 miles west of Gainesville.
When additional deputies responded to the restaurant, Ace China, they found both the deputies dead inside it, and the suspect — John Hubert Highnote, 59, of nearby Bell — dead outside, according to the Gilchrist County Sheriff’s Office.
The office said that the suspect’s motive was unclear, and Sheriff Bobby Schultz declined at a Thursday night news conference to confirm whether he had killed himself. The Florida Department of Law Enforcement was investigating.
Schultz identified the victims as Sgt. Noel Ramirez, 29, and Deputy Taylor Lindsey, 25. Ramirez was married with two young children, and Lindsey was unmarried but had a girlfriend.
“I made contact with the families, and as you’d expect, you can never be prepared for something like this,” Schultz said. “But make no mistake, they’re proud of their families. They understood when their loved ones pinned on the badge and they strapped on the gun that this was a possibility.”
Trenton, the seat of rural Gilchrist County, is a small town of around 2,000 residents, but the killing of the deputies drew the attention and condolences of national officials.
“My thoughts, prayers and condolences are with the families, friends and colleagues of the two @GCSOFlorida deputies (HEROES) who lost their lives in the line of duty today,” President Donald Trump tweeted Thursday evening.
The Florida attorney general, Pam Bondi, expressed her “deepest condolences and prayers” and said in a statement, “The daily risk that law enforcement officers take to protect our communities is overwhelming.”
In his news conference, Schultz said his department would “honor these men by doing our jobs.”
“We haven’t been through anything quite like this before, but what makes our county unique is that we’re a family,” he said. “We’re going to grieve. We’re going to get upset. We’re probably going to cuss a little bit. But at the end of the day, we’re going to remember those two men for who they are. They’re heroes.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.