Hun­dreds of ter­ri­fied shop­pers fled in pan­ic af­ter a gun­man stepped out of a sedan and opened fire at a Dal­las-area out­let mall, killing eight peo­ple and wound­ing sev­en be­fore be­ing killed by a po­lice of­fi­cer who hap­pened to be near­by, au­thor­i­ties said.

Sat­ur­day’s shoot­ing in Allen, Texas, was the lat­est erup­tion of gun vi­o­lence in the U.S., which has seen an un­prece­dent­ed pace of mass killings this year. Bare­ly a week be­fore, five peo­ple were fa­tal­ly shot in Cleve­land, Texas, af­ter a neigh­bor asked a man to stop fir­ing his weapon while a ba­by slept, au­thor­i­ties said.

Po­lice did not im­me­di­ate­ly pro­vide de­tails about the vic­tims at Allen Pre­mi­um Out­lets, a sprawl­ing out­door shop­ping cen­ter, but wit­ness­es re­port­ed see­ing chil­dren among them. Some said they al­so saw what ap­peared to be a po­lice of­fi­cer and a mall se­cu­ri­ty guard un­con­scious on the ground.

A 16-year-old pret­zel stand em­ploy­ee, Maxwell Gum, de­scribed a vir­tu­al stam­pede of shop­pers. He and oth­ers shel­tered in a stor­age room.

“We start­ed run­ning. Kids were get­ting tram­pled,” Gum said. “My co-work­er picked up a 4-year-old girl and gave her to her par­ents.”

Dash­cam video cir­cu­lat­ing on­line showed the gun­man get­ting out of a car and shoot­ing at peo­ple on the side­walk. More than three dozen shots could be heard as the ve­hi­cle that was record­ing the video drove off.

Allen Fire Chief Jonathan Boyd said sev­en peo­ple, in­clud­ing the shoot­er, died at the scene. Nine vic­tims were tak­en to hos­pi­tals. Two of them died.

Three of the wound­ed were in crit­i­cal con­di­tion Sat­ur­day evening, and four were sta­ble, Boyd said.

An Allen Po­lice De­part­ment of­fi­cer was in the area on an un­re­lat­ed call when he heard shots at 3:36 p.m., the de­part­ment wrote on Face­book.

“The of­fi­cer en­gaged the sus­pect and neu­tral­ized the threat. He then called for emer­gency per­son­nel,” the post said.

Mass killings have hap­pened with stag­ger­ing fre­quen­cy in the Unit­ed States this year, with an av­er­age of about one per week, ac­cord­ing to a data­base main­tained by The As­so­ci­at­ed Press and USA To­day in part­ner­ship with North­east­ern Uni­ver­si­ty.

Pres­i­dent Biden was briefed on the shoot­ing in Allen, and the ad­min­is­tra­tion of­fered sup­port to lo­cal of­fi­cials, the White House said. Re­pub­li­can Texas Gov. Greg Ab­bott, who has signed laws eas­ing firearms re­stric­tions fol­low­ing past mass shoot­ings, called the mall at­tack an “un­speak­able tragedy.”

By JAKE BLEIBERG and RE­BEC­CA BOONE

ALLEN, Texas (AP)