3 Fatally Shot, 3 Injured After Dog Complaint

HUGO, Okla. —  A man who had gone to authorities with a complaint about a dog bought a rifle Friday, then shot and killed two people and injured three others in a shopping center parking lot before killing himself, officials said.

“It was just bam, bam, bam. I thought, this is not for real. They’re playing or something,” said Mary Lou Wilkins, who works at the shopping center. “And then I saw people ducking and running, and I said this is for real.”

The gunman, identified as David Mack Flinn, 39, killed Luke Sheehan, 52, and his wife, Mary Sheehan, 47, officials at the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation said.

Police initially said three other people were shot and wounded, but Assistant Dist. Atty. Larry Grant said two of the three were hurt by flying glass. The third shooting victim was in surgery in a hospital in Paris, Tex.

They were caught in the gunfire as they left a Wal-Mart store in Hugo, a southeastern Oklahoma town of nearly 6,000 residents near the Texas border.

Minutes after the shooting, Flinn was found dead in his truck on a dirt road a few miles from the shopping center.

Authorities initially said Flinn knew the Sheehans and that they were his intended victims but later backed away from that statement.

Agents were searching the home of the unemployed single man late Friday. “We’re looking for notes, anything to help us know what the motive was,” Grant said.

He said Flinn, who had an extensive record, mostly for property crimes, went to the Choctaw County Sheriff’s Department on Friday morning with a complaint about a dog. He reportedly was agitated and told deputies: “I’ll prosecute this myself.”

Also on Friday morning, Flinn bought an assault rifle at a pawnshop, lying on his application about his criminal record, Grant said.

Flinn pleaded guilty in 1979 to assault with a deadly weapon in San Bernardino, Calif., and was convicted or pleaded guilty to property crimes in the Pomona, Calif., area and in Dallas between 1979 and 1987, Grant said. He had no record in Oklahoma.