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A 20-year-old man was taken into custody on Saturday night in connection with a shooting that killed five people on Friday at a mall north of Seattle, the authorities said.
The authorities, speaking at a news conference on Saturday night, identified the suspect as Arcan Cetin of Oak Harbor, Wash. He was taken into custody without incident around 6:30 p.m.
Officials said that they had received numerous tips about the gunman and that surveillance footage had helped locate him.
Lt. Michael Hawley of the Island County Sheriff’s Office said he had received a report that Mr. Cetin’s car was less than a mile from his office and when he headed that way, he found Mr. Cetin walking on the sidewalk. Mr. Cetin was carrying a satchel with a computer inside and was in a “zombielike” state when he was taken into custody, the lieutenant said.
Charges were pending, said the authorities, who said it was too early to say what led to the shootings.
On his Facebook page, Mr. Cetin listed his hometown as Adana, Turkey. Officials said he was a legal permanent resident of the United States. He graduated last year from Oak Harbor High School and listed himself on Facebook as a bagger at the Whidbey Island Commissary.
Little of his personality could be gleaned from his sparse social media presence, which included only 56 posts on Twitter.
His Facebook page offered a glimpse of his life. A posting by a friend in 2011 described him as “really annoying,” “funny” and “sometimes really nasty.” Mr. Cetin referred to lifting weights in high school and posted videos of the video game Call of Duty.
Another Facebook posting, by a friend in 2012, said of Mr. Cetin: “Truth is: You are a very odd character. You were always going on about being Russian and stuff like that, but under that you really supported America (or so it seemed to me) and I always thought that was really cool.”
Mr. Cetin was active in the Reserve Officers Training Corps, said the former classmate, Uhlaine Finnigan, 19, of Port Angeles, Wash.
She called Mr. Cetin “sexist” and said he would touch girls on their buttocks, “either slapping or grabbing them.”
“He did that to girls of all grades at the high school including my best friend and I, regardless of the blatant disgust from the girls and being told to stop,” she said in an interview by Facebook Messenger. She said he appeared to have few friends.
The attacker at the Cascade Mall in Burlington, Wash., killed four women in the cosmetics section of a Macy’s department store, the authorities said. A man was critically wounded in the shooting and was taken to Harborview Medical Center in Seattle, where he died. The youngest female victim was a teenager, law enforcement officials said at a news conference on Saturday morning.
The gunman, who was armed with a rifle, left the scene before the police arrived. Officials said they recovered the weapon at the scene. They declined to give details about the weapon or to say how many rounds were fired. Photographs of Mr. Cetin on a Myspace account showed him holding a handgun and a rifle.
A spokesman for the F.B.I.’s Seattle field office said on Saturday that there was no evidence to suggest that the shooting was an act of terrorism.
At the news conference on Saturday night, Mayor Steve Sexton of Burlington said the shootings happened at a time and in a setting that were ordinary: a Friday night at a mall.
Referring to the shootings, he said: “They changed those families forever. It changed our city, I’m afraid to some extent, forever.”
Interactive Feature | Site of Shooting
The names of the victims had not yet been released by officials.
Security camera footage showed the man entering the mall without a weapon. Footage taken 10 minutes later showed him entering Macy’s with a rifle.
At the news conference earlier on Saturday, the authorities described the tense moments after the shooting, as officers searched the roughly 440,000-square-foot mall for the attacker, finding only store employees and shoppers.
Police officers entered the mall in teams, unaware during the search, which lasted for hours, that the gunman had fled before their arrival. They searched “every room and every nook and cranny,” said Lt. Chris Cammock, the commander of the multiagency response team conducting the investigation.
The F.B.I. said early Saturday that it had “no information to suggest that additional attacks” were planned in Washington State, and that it was coordinating intelligence efforts with the local authorities. More than 200 officers from at least 26 agencies responded to the shooting, the authorities said.
One woman, Tari Caswell, told The Skagit Valley Herald that she had been in the Macy’s women’s dressing room when she heard four loud pops, followed by seven or eight more.
“I just stayed quiet in the dressing room because it just didn’t feel right,” she said. “And it got very quiet. And then I heard a lady yelling for help, and a man came and got me and another lady, and we ran out of the store.”
The attack was the seventh time this year in which at least four people were killed in a shooting in Washington, according to The Seattle Times.
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