One killed, another injured in Delaware hospital shooting

Gunfire inside ChristianaCare Wilmington Hospital turned a place built for care into a crime scene Tuesday afternoon, leaving one person dead and another injured. Police said the shooter remained at large as hospital staff hid and officers cleared the building.

The shooting was reported about 3:30 p.m. at the Wilmington hospital, at 501 West 14th Street in Wilmington, Delaware. ChristianaCare said the campus was locked down and the emergency department was placed on divert while it worked with law enforcement on what it described as an active police investigation for a possible active shooter. The lockdown was later lifted Tuesday night.

Wilmington Police Chief Wilfredo Campos said investigators were still trying to identify and locate the shooter and determine how the person left the building. Police declined to identify the victims or disclose the condition of the surviving victim, citing respect for the families. Wilmington Mayor John Carney said hospital workers hid as officers swept the facility, underscoring how quickly violence can overwhelm a setting that patients, families and staff expect to be safe.

ChristianaCare Wilmington Hospital is no small neighborhood facility. The health system says it has 321 beds, a 622,100-square-foot campus, and services that include an emergency department, a helipad and Level III trauma care. ChristianaCare also describes the hospital as a Wilmington landmark since 1890 and one of its major city institutions, which made Tuesday’s shooting especially jarring in a building that routinely treats the city’s most urgent medical cases.

Authorities said the suspect was believed to be known to police, and ABC News reported that law enforcement officials believed the shooting was strictly a workplace incident and that the suspect may have been a temporary employee. If that account holds, it would place the violence squarely inside the high-risk world of workplace conflict and hospital access, where security procedures are supposed to screen threats before they reach patients, nurses and physicians.

The attack also fit a broader national pattern that has sharpened concern about safety in medical settings. A 2026 systematic review in JAMA Network Open found 327 unique hospital-based shooting events from 2012 to 2024, with annual incidents rising from 14 to 34 over that span. The study found nearly one-third of those shootings were potentially preventable through weapons screening, a stark reminder that hospitals, despite their security protocols, remain vulnerable to the same gun violence that has spread across the country.