RENO, Nev. — A Colorado man apparently shot himself to death Thursday following a 40-mile police chase on a high desert highway, a gun battle that injured a sheriff's deputy and a head-on crash that killed an elderly motorist in a rural northern Nevada town, the state patrol said.
The 22-year-old suspect shot at officers after the crash, then apparently turned the handgun on himself while in the wrecked car at a busy intersection in Fallon just before 6 a.m., Nevada Highway Patrol Trooper Chuck Allen said.
"There was some exchange of gunfire after the collision. We are still trying to piece it all together," Allen told The Associated Press. "It was a tragic event."
"The physical evidence suggests the perpetrator took his own life, but there was an exchange of gunfire," Allen said about the possibility the fatal shot was fired by one of the officers. He declined to provide details but said later that investigators wanted to emphasize the official cause of death won't be determined until the county coroner completes an autopsy.
A Churchill County sheriff's deputy was hit in the cheek by either a bullet fragment or a shard of glass from gunfire into his windshield near the end of the pursuit on U.S. Highway 95, Allen said. The deputy was treated and released from a hospital in Fallon, about 60 miles east of Reno where U.S. Highways 95 and 50 intersect.
Authorities were withholding the names of the deputy, the 75-year-old man from Richland, Mo., killed in the crash and the dead suspect from Peyton, Colo.
The Colorado man was a passenger in a PT Cruiser with Arkansas license plates that was stopped by tribal police for going 80 mph in a 40 mph zone. The vehicle's driver — Cory Reed, 20, of Little Rock, Ark. — was then "forced out — pushed out if you will — by his passenger who in turn got in the driver's seat and fled," Allen said.
Allen said they had not determined what if any relationship existed between the two men. "He could have been a hitchhiker, cousins, old best friends, we don't know," he said.
The Colorado man took off in the PT Cruiser heading south on U.S. 95 toward Hawthorne, but at some point reversed course and headed back north toward Fallon, he said.
At least two other vehicles sustained damage when they either were run into or forced off the road by the suspect before the fatal crash, Allen said. No one was hurt in those two incidents, he said.
Investigators have not determined whether there were any wants or warrants out for the Colorado man, Allen said. They also don't know how many shots were fired or who fired them, he said.