Police investigating reports of gunfire in Capitol office building

WASHINGTON -- Police investigated reports of gunfire in a House office building Friday and sealed off the Capitol as a precaution. Police said there were no immediate injuries or arrests.\n"The report is that shots were fired" at 10:30 a.m. EDT in the garage of the Rayburn House Office Building, said Capitol Police spokeswoman Sgt. Kimberly Schneider.\n"We have not gotten any reports of anybody being captured, anybody being arrested." She also said there were no reports of injuries.\nOn high alert, police lined the street between the Capitol and the Rayburn building, rifles prominently displayed, and four ambulances, two firetrucks and other emergency vehicles were on standby outside the office structure.\nSchneider said the search and police deployment was triggered by a single telephone call from an unidentified individual. Police had no other confirmation of gunfire, she said at a noon EDT news conference.\n"Right now we want to err on the side of caution," Schneider said. "Lives could be at risk. If we have a gunman in the building we certainly want to find him. It's premature to assume that it may not be a gunman."\nThe Senate was in session at the time, but the House was not as most lawmakers had left for the Memorial Day recess.\nRep. Peter Hoekstra, R-Mich., conducting a House Intelligence Committee hearing, interrupted a witness to request those attending the meeting to remain in the room and said the doors must be closed.\n"It's a little unsettling to get a Blackberry message put in front of you that says there's gunfire in the building," he said.\nThe Rayburn House Office Building was completed in early 1965 and is the third of three office buildings constructed for the U.S. House of Representatives. It sits across the street from the Capitol. The building has four stories above ground, two basements and three levels of underground garage space.\nSteven Broderick, press spokesman for Rep. William Delahunt, D-Mass., was in his car in the Rayburn garage Friday morning getting ready to drive his boss to the airport when he was ordered by a Capitol Police officer to park the car and put his hands on the steering wheel. The officer then told him to run toward an exit where other officers where gathered.\n"He just told me to run and don't look back," Broderick said.\nThe U.S. Capitol Police Department's Containment & Emergency Response Team maintains an indoor shooting range in the basement of the Rayburn building, according to the department's Web site. Eleanor Holmes Norton, the District of Columbia's delegate to Congress, raised the possibility that noises from a nearby construction site were mistaken for gunfire.\nWithin minutes of the reports, Rayburn halls were virtually empty and police were not allowing anyone to leave or take elevators or stairs to the garage.\n"No one's panicking, everyone's calm," said Charles Isom, spokesman for Rep. Chris Cannon, R-Utah. "It did ruin some people's lunch plans."\nThe incident occurred at the end of a week of unusually tumultuous series of events that ironically enough, began in the same building. FBI agents armed with a search warrant seized documents and computer material from the first office of Rep. William Jefferson, D-La., in a weekend raid. Jefferson is at the center of a federal bribery investigation.\nAt the Capitol, police quickly closed all doors, stopping people from entering the building. Tourists were herded into a first-floor chamber in the middle of the building. Other corridors on the House side of the building, where lawmakers had already left for the recess, were deserted.\nThe Capitol was reopened within an hour, then sealed back off by police, and eventually opened to the public again about 12:30 p.m. EDT.\nJeff Connor, a spokesman for Rep. Jo Ann Emerson, R-Mo., said Capitol Hill police notified the office that gunfire was heard in the Rayburn building garage.\n"They specifically said there was the sound of gunfire on one of the garage levels of the Rayburn House office building and asked staff to remain in their offices," Connor said.\nIncidents of violence inside the Capitol and its office buildings are rare.\nOn July 24, 1998, a man with a history of mental illness shot and killed Capitol Police officer Jacob J. Chestnut at a first-floor Capitol entrance. He then charged into an adjacent suite of offices occupied by Tom DeLay, then the House Republican whip, and exchanged fire with officer John Gibson, who also was killed. The gunman was wounded and captured.\nIn 1983, a late-night bomb, possibly set by someone protesting U.S. military action in Grenada and Lebanon, exploded just outside the Senate chamber. No one was injured.