Authorities are still investigating a Saturday night shooting at the downtown Little Rock Marriott hotel and say two groups of men were likely involved.
Officers responded to a hotel at the 3 Statehouse Plaza around 9:40 p.m. after getting a call shots had been fired inside the building, according to a police report.
Police found evidence of gunfire on the 17th floor and were told a group of three men had recently fled from the building and gone south on Louisiana Street, the report said.
Officers found multiple spent casings and live rounds from 9 mm Luger handguns strewn about the hallway. A few walls had been struck by the bullets, officials said. Police also said they recovered a lighter, a set of headphones and two cellphones from the scene.
Officers reportedly searched room to room and could not find anyone who had been injured.
Witnesses told police they heard loud arguing followed by gunshots and saw, from their hotel room peepholes, a group of three men running through the hallway to a stairwell. Guests in a nearby hallway said they saw another group of men running through the hallway to the opposite stairwell, the report said.
The floor was on lockdown immediately after the shooting, police said. No suspects were identified on the report.
Tara Newman from Jonesboro said she and her family were in town for her daughter’s gymnastics meet and they were staying on the eighth floor when the shots rang out.
She said she heard a loud noise, then a pause, followed by two more bangs closer together.
Newman said the sounds didn’t really seem like a gunshots at first. It was “just extremely, extremely loud,” she said. Her 3-year-old daughter sat up in bed and asked her, “What was that?”
About five minutes later, Newman said, she heard police sirens. Her husband, Chris, who was downstairs, let her know the hotel was on lockdown and said not to come out of the room.
Newman said she put the extra deadbolt across the door and waited until Chris was able to come back upstairs roughly 40 minutes later. She said she and her family didn’t feel unsafe sleeping at the hotel that night, though the experience was uncommon.
“It was definitely something new for us,” she said.
