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04-05-2009, 07:03 PM

Dimebag Darrell, guitarist for Damageplan and Pantera, was killed during a shooting spree at a Columbus, Ohio, nightclub Wednesday night. He was 38.

Darrell, real name Darrell Abbott, was among the five people killed during the incident. Also dead are the gunman, 25-year-old Nathan Gale of nearby Marysville, Ohio; Damageplan bodyguard Jeff Thompson, 40; fan Nathan Bray, 23; and Erin Halk, 29, who worked at the club. Gale also wounded three people.

Damageplan had just begun their first song in front of approximately 250 people at Alrosa Villa when the gunman jumped onstage, made a comment about Pantera, and began firing at close range into Darrell's body, shooting him several times before opening fire on the crowd (see " 'Dimebag' Darrell Abbott: A Larger-Than-Life Guitarist And Human Being").

A patrol officer nearby, James Niggemeyer, heard the call of shots fired at 10:18 p.m. and by 10:20 p.m. had snuck inside the club through a back door, according to public information officer Sergeant Brent Mull. After entering, Niggemeyer, who had no backup, confronted the gunman onstage, where he observed one victim and Gale holding a hostage by the neck.

"The officer was able to strategically gun this guy down before he was able to kill his hostage, and it appeared that he was about to kill his hostage," Mull said at a press conference Thursday (December 9). "The suspect had the hostage in a headlock situation and had his firearm out shooting, and it's believed he was about to take his gun to the hostage."

But the hostage wriggled out of the way slightly, Mull said, and the officer was able to kill the shooter with a single shotgun blast as the hostage escaped uninjured. Police said Gale, whose arrest record lists him as 6 feet 3 inches tall and 225 pounds, used a Beretta 9 mm semiautomatic handgun and reloaded once during the shooting. Gale's prior arrests were all nonviolent, and included driving with a suspended license and trespassing.

Police have not confirmed the names of the three wounded victims, but the club's manager told the Dispatch that one of them was a security guard who had tried to wrestle the attacker's gun away. Damageplan reps say the other two wounded were tour manager Chris Paluska, who is in critical but stable condition, and drum tech John "Kat" Brooks, who was scheduled to be released from the hospital Friday.

"If the officer hadn't acted when he did and how he did, we'd probably be looking at more dead, because this guy was actively shooting," Mull said. Following the incident, police took more than 200 patrons onto three city-donated buses, where they were interviewed by some 60 police detectives.