A suspected gunman fatally shot three people at separate locations in the Houston area before killing himself, authorities said on Oct. 8.

"We have a very tragic incident today, and it's got several moving parts," Houston Police Lt. Larry Crowson told reporters at a news conference just hours after the events unfurled.

The series of events began just before 1 p.m. on Oct. 8 when police officers in Sugar Land, Texas, responded to a shooting near Dairy Ashford Road and Highway 90, about 19 miles southwest of downtown Houston. They found a female with several gunshot wounds in the driver's seat of a white SUV that had gone off the road, Sugar Land police said.

The incident was initially thought to be linked to road rage. But the Sugar Land Police Department later said on Oct. 8 that they had learned that the woman and the shooting suspect had a relationship.

"This incident was not a random act of road rage violence," the department said in a news release posted on Facebook. The woman was transported to a local hospital, where she was pronounced dead.

Crowson said officers later received a report at about 1:30 p.m. of a shooting at a mechanic shop in southwest Houston, about 10 minutes east of where the first shooting had occurred.

"There was a report that a male in a silver Ford Escape, which matched the description of the vehicle in the Sugar Land shooting, had been involved in an altercation with a mechanic there," Crowson said. The mechanic was killed, he added.

As the suspect began to flee the scene, Crowson said, another individual came out from an adjacent warehouse and started to record the suspect leaving.

"The suspect then fired several shots, killing that witness," he said.

Crowson said the suspect then drove to an area about two and a half miles north of the mechanic shop, where police received a report of another shooting. Arriving officers found the suspect inside the vehicle, dead from an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound, he said.

Police have not released any further details about the victims or the suspect. The connection between the shooting incidents remains unclear.

Crowson stressed there was no danger to the public and added that the incident remains under investigation.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: 3 killed after series of Houston-area shootings, authorities say; suspect dead

Reporting by Marc Ramirez, USA TODAY / USA TODAY

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