Santa Monica Shooting Update - 6 Dead Including the Shooter John Zawahri

Local news reports

The death toll from a mass shooting in California rose to five on Sunday after a 26-year-old woman seriously wounded during the gun rampage died in hospital, authorities said.

Marcela Franco was caught in a hail of bullets that also claimed the life of her father Carlos during the shooting on Friday in the upmarket beach resort of Santa Monica carried out by a gunman clad in black and wearing body armour.

Local media reports have identified the gunman as John Zawahri, who was due to turn 24 on Saturday. The gunman was shot and killed by police after being cornered in the library of Santa Monica College.

Police have still not pinpointed a motive for the killings. The carnage began on Friday when a house was set on fire in Santa Monica. Police later found the bodies of Zawahri's father and brother inside.

The heavily armed gunman, carrying some 1,300 rounds of ammunition, then headed to Santa Monica College, where he fired indiscriminately at students before eventually being shot dead by police.

Update on the Santa Monica Mass Shooting - 5 Dead 5 Wounded

Associated Press/Damian Dovarganes - A firefighter walks past a car with bullet holes across a home that caught fire in Santa Monica, Calif. Friday, June 7, 2013. Two people were found dead Friday in a burned home near the school, where someone sprayed a street corner with gunfire, wounding at least three people, authorities said. (AP Photo/Damian Dovarganes) 

Yahoo News 

The gunman, dressed all in black and carrying a semi-automatic rifle, walked calmly through the Santa Monica College campus after killing his father, brother at their home and another man near the school, authorities said. He would kill a woman outside the library moments later, before dying from police gunfire.

Trena Johnson, a longtime administrative assistant working in the dean's office, heard gunfire and looked out the window around noon Friday. Students were jumping out of windows of nearby buildings to get away. A man in black with a "very large gun" shot a woman in the head outside the library.

The violence, which lasted little more than 10 minutes, started about a mile away when the gunman began shooting at a house, and it caught on fire. Two bodies were later found inside, police Chief Jacqueline Seabrooks said.

Two officials told The Associated Press that the killings began as a domestic violence incident and the victims in the home were the gunman's father and brother. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to publicly discuss the case.

The gunman also fired on police cars, bystanders and pedestrians, police said.

College employee Joe Orcutt was in the lot and said the gunman looked calm and composed as he fired at him. Orcutt jumped out of the way.

"He's just standing there, like he's modeling for some ammo magazine," Orcutt said, "seeing who he could shoot, one bullet at a time, like target practice."

Mass Shooting in Santa Monica - 7 Dead, Maybe More

The body of a man believed to be the suspect in a shooting incident at Santa Monica College lies on the sidewalk in Santa Monica, Calfornia June 7, 2013. Police report the gunman killed at least six people before he was shot to death. REUTERS/Daniel Kraft

Yahoo News reports

A gunman killed at least six people in Santa Monica, California, on Friday before he was shot dead by police at a library of a community college, Police Chief Jacqueline Seabrooks said.

Seabrooks said a second individual she described as a "person of interest" had been taken into custody in connection with the violence, which unfolded a few miles from where President Barack Obama was attending a political fundraiser.

Authorities also found two people dead at the scene of a nearby house fire, but police said it was not immediately clear whether the fire and the shooting incident were related.

Earlier, a spokeswoman for the California Highway Patrol had told Reuters that officers had received a report of a man armed with multiple weapons, including a shotgun, firing at passing cars and a bus at two locations near the college campus just west of Los Angeles.

Students at the campus library described a scene of pandemonium as the sounds of gunfire rang out, sending students scurrying for cover.

One student inside the library, Cyrus Jabari, 19, said he could see through a window a man dressed in black with a buzz-style haircut carrying what appeared to be an assault rifle.