JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — The Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office is looking for two people in masks who it says shot and killed a man in the parking lot of a Baymeadows hotel.
JSO tells Action News Jax the shooting happened on Tuesday at around 1:15 AM at the Embassy Suites hotel on Baymeadows Road.
Police say a man walked outside after attending a gathering, which police say was likely a birthday party, inside one of the hotel rooms, when the two people walked up and shot him in the parking lot.
The shots woke Jake Vickary up as he was staying in a room three floors above where the shooting happened.
“At first it was like, no, it couldn’t be what I think it is, and I just went on back to bed. But dang,” Vickary said, “it sounded like there was, you know, a good amount of shots being fired.”
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Vickary said he thought he heard up to seven shots fired before going back to bed. When we tried walking out of the hotel’s front entrance this morning, he walked right into the crime scene after police had taped off the entire hotel.
“The worst thoughts go through your mind when you hear something like that, and you’re thinking it couldn’t be gunshots, then you walk down and find out it is,” said Vickary.
Aaron Taylor was also staying at the hotel overnight and was woken up by the gunshots, too. He said that he, too, thought it may have been something else before he walked outside.
“It just sounded like some commotion. I didn’t put it all together until this morning, you know, when I came downstairs and saw everything was blocked off,” Taylor said.
Both Vickary and Taylor told Action News Jax they were on work trips to Jacksonville and have stayed at this hotel multiple times in the past without seeing anything like this.
Action News Jax reached out to Hilton, the company behind Embassy Suites, to ask how, if at all, it would be working to ensure something like this didn’t happen at this hotel again, or if it was working with JSO in its investigation.
In an emailed response, the company told us its press office was closed and it couldn’t fulfill our request.
We also called and emailed JSO to ask for updates in the investigation into the shooting, and were told no other information could be provided at this time.
Neither the man who died or the suspected shooters have yet been named by police.
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