3 dead, including gunman, after shooting in Winthrop, Massachusetts, police say
A retired state trooper and an Air Force veteran were killed in what investigators describe as a racially motivated attack before an officer fatally shot the gunman.
Three people are dead, including the gunman, after a shooting Saturday afternoon in Winthrop, Massachusetts, a suburb east of Boston near Logan International Airport. Around 2:45 p.m. on June 26, 2021, Nathan Allen, 28, stole a box truck and crashed it into a residential building on Veterans Road, then got out and opened fire on bystanders, according to coverage from Boston 25 News and other outlets.
Allen shot and killed David Green, 68, a retired Massachusetts State Trooper, and Ramona Cooper, 60, an Air Force veteran. Winthrop police returned fire at the scene, fatally wounding Allen. Both victims were unarmed civilians who were in the area at the time of the attack.
Investigators said the attack appears to have been racially motivated: both victims were Black, and reporting describes 'troubling white supremacist rhetoric' from Allen, including anti-Semitic and racist writing found at the scene. The exact content and full context of that writing was not detailed in the available reporting.
How the attack unfolded
The confrontation began at Shirley and Cross streets in Winthrop before Allen crashed the stolen truck into the Veterans Road building. He then shot Green and Cooper before police, including Sgt. Nicholas Bettano, engaged and killed him. The sequence places the truck theft, the crash and the shootings within a short span of the same afternoon, though the precise timeline between each step was not specified minute-by-minute in the source coverage.
Community response
The killings shocked the small town and drew national attention. More than a thousand residents gathered at Winthrop Town Hall in the days after the shooting to remember Green and Cooper, according to coverage of the aftermath.
What is still under investigation
At the time of initial reporting, officials had not released a complete account of Allen's motive beyond the hate-crime indicators found at the scene, and the full circumstances of how he came to steal the truck were not detailed. Later reporting examined the police response itself, but the facts of that later review are a separate matter from the events of June 26.
US In News compiled this archived account from contemporaneous coverage by Boston 25 News and NBC Boston. It restores a story originally published on this site in June 2021; figures are as reported at the time.