Four other people were in fair condition, according to the official, Allison Hendrickson, a spokeswoman for St. Elizabeth Community Hospital in Red Bluff, which is about 130 miles north of Sacramento. She did not provide further details.
A Walmart employee, Franklin Lister, 51, said he and a group of other employees had just clocked into their afternoon shifts when an employee ran down the hallway shouting: “Active gunfire! Active shooter!”
Mr. Lister said he had seen blood dripping from his colleague’s arm.
“That’s when I realized it wasn’t a drill,” he said.
Mr. Lister and his co-workers ran out of the nearest fire exit.
As they were running, he said, they heard 50 to 60 gunshots — at which point they picked up their speed and helped each other over a barbed-wire fence.
When Mr. Lister looked back at the building, he saw that a white vehicle had rammed into an entrance, he said. The glass that had shattered from the crash caused his colleague’s arm to bleed, he said.
“To hear that much gunfire, it was frantic,” said Mr. Lister, who unloads deliveries that are then repackaged and shipped to Walmart stores. “People were running as fast as they could move.”
Emergency dispatchers told The Record Searchlight, a newspaper in Redding, Calif., that officials had shot the gunman in the chest around 3:45 p.m. local time, less than 15 minutes after the shooting began.
A Walmart employee, Scott Thammakhanty, told the newspaper that he had heard gunshots and had seen people on the ground as he and other employees ran. He said that the gunman looked familiar but that he did not know his identity.
A number of employees barricaded themselves in the back of the distribution center, according to police radio transmissions at the time.
The Tehama County Sheriff’s Office did not immediately respond to a request for comment. A Walmart spokesman said the company would issue a statement later.
Lacie Miller, the 37-year-old assistant manager of a nearby convenience store, said employees who had gathered outside of the building said that the vehicle crash had caused a fire at the distribution center.
This is the second workplace-related shooting in two days to result in multiple deaths.
Two workers at a coffee dispenser warehouse in Springfield, Ill., were fatally shot on Friday after a co-worker opened fire, the authorities said. Another worker was critically wounded. The gunman fled and was found in his vehicle more than two hours later, dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound, the authorities said.