A deadly shooting rampage in southern Brazil ended Wednesday morning after a 45-year-old gunman killed three people, including his father, brother, and a police officer, during a ten-hour standoff that left nine others injured before he was found dead inside the residence.
The violence erupted late Tuesday in Novo Hamburgo, near Porto Alegre, when the gunman’s father called police reporting his son’s aggressive behavior, authorities said at a news conference in the Rio Grande do Sul state capital. The situation quickly escalated into what civil police chief Fernando Antônio Sodré de Oliveira described as “a war scenario.”
“He had plenty of ammunition, two pistols… and two more rifles, and he was shooting at the police officers the whole time,” de Oliveira said. Among the injured were six military police officers, a municipal guard, and the shooter’s mother and sister-in-law.
The slain officer was identified as Everton Kirsch Júnior, 31, who left behind a 45-day-old baby, according to Governor Eduardo Leite. Officials provided conflicting accounts of the gunman’s death, with Leite stating police killed the shooter while conference officials said it remained unclear whether he was shot by police or died by suicide.
Authorities revealed both the gunman, a truck driver, and his father had histories of schizophrenia. The incident has reignited Brazil’s contentious gun control debate, with President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva noting the shooter legally possessed four registered weapons.
“This cannot be normalized: the indiscriminate distribution of weapons in society, with many of them falling into the hands of criminals, is unacceptable,” Lula posted on social platform X, contrasting his position with former President Jair Bolsonaro’s looser firearm regulations.
The shooting follows Lula’s July 2023 decree tightening civilian access to guns, a response to increasing school shootings in a country where such incidents were historically rare. The measure aimed to reverse Bolsonaro’s pro-firearm policies, which had argued for citizens’ right to protect their families and property.
Special operations forces discovered the gunman’s body when they finally entered the house Wednesday morning, ending a night of terror that highlighted ongoing tensions over Brazil’s approach to gun ownership and mental health care.
