Four people, including a police officer, died of gunshot wounds Sunday during a law enforcement investigation of a break-in at a house in northeast Ohio, the authorities said.

Four other law enforcement officers were injured.

The episode occurred in Rittman, a city of more than 6,000 people about 40 miles south of Cleveland.

In a statement Monday, Chief Robert Shows of the Rittman Police Department identified the officer who was killed as Sgt. Scott Ries, 54, a 10-year veteran of the department who had previously served as a deputy sheriff for the Wayne County Sheriff’s Office, and as an officer in the Sugar Grove Police Department in Fairfield County, Ohio.

A separate statement Monday from the Wayne County Sheriff’s Office and the Medina County Sheriff’s Office said Brandon Fazekas, 39, and two victims, Christine McWilliams, 44, and her daughter McKinley McWilliams, 13, were pronounced dead at the scene.

Fazekas, the suspected shooter and a former partner of Christine McWilliams, died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound, Sheriff Thomas Ballinger of Wayne County said in a telephone interview Monday.

Ries and the other police officers arrived at the house about 10 p.m. Sunday in response to a call about a “break-in and shots fired,” Shows said in his statement. They came under fire immediately, he said.

The police and sheriff departments offered no additional details about what led to the shootings. The Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation said in a statement that it was investigating what it described as an “officer-involved shooting.”

Shows’ joint statement with Ballinger and Sheriff Terry Grice of Medina County said three officers from Medina County and one from the Hinckley Police Department were injured. Rittman’s boundaries fall within each county.

Two were treated at the scene and two were sent to the hospital and are in stable condition, the statement said.

A police dog from Wayne County was also injured by gunfire, it said.

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This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

By Christine Hauser
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