MIDDLETON, Wis. — Four people were shot and wounded during a shooting Wednesday at a software company in a suburb of Madison, Wisconsin, according to a city administrator.
The suspected shooter was also critically injured during the late-morning shooting at WTS Paradigm in Middleton, City Administrator Mike Davis said. He said police have lifted a lockdown but did not immediately have additional information.
A spokeswoman at University Hospital said the hospital has accepted four patients from the shooting. Their conditions were not immediately available.
Judy Lahmers, a business analyst at WTS Paradigm, said she was working at her desk when she heard shots at about 10 a.m. She said it sounded “like somebody was dropping boards on the ground, really loud.” Lahmers said she ran out of the building and hid behind a car. She said the building’s glass entrance door shattered.
“I’m not looking back, I’m running as fast as I can. You just wonder, ‘Do you hide or do you run?’” she said.
She said she knew that one co-worker had been grazed by a shot but was OK. She didn’t have any other information. She said the shooting was “totally unexpected. We’re all software people. We have a good group.”
The Dane County dispatch center said shots were reported around 10 a.m. at the building, which also houses Esker Software. Police and multiple ambulances have responded.
Gabe Geib, a customer advocate at Esker Software, said he was working at his desk when he heard a couple of shots coming from next door which “sounded like claps.” He said he then saw people running “full sprint” away from the building.
“We knew at that point that something was going down. A ton of people were running across the street right in front of us,” he said. More than an hour after the shooting, he and his colleagues were huddled in place in their cafeteria, away from windows.
Jeff Greene, who also works at Esker, said police told those gathered in the cafeteria to go a nearby hotel to make a statement about what they saw.
At least 40 people were gathered in the hotel’s parking lot, waiting to be interviewed by police.
WTS Paradigm makes software for the building products industry. A Wisconsin State Journal profile from 2014 listed company employment at about 145 employees, and noted the company was looking to move to a larger location at the time. The company’s website was down Wednesday.
The shopping center next to the building, Greenway Station, was locked down at the direction of police, according to the center’s general manager Corey Kautzky. There are 34 stores and restaurants in the center that were temporarily closed, Kautzky said.
Middleton is about 90 miles (145 kilometers) west of Milwaukee.
