4 dead in shooting at Cook’s Corner biker bar in Southern California

LOS ANGELES — The gunman believed to have carried out a shooting that left three people dead at a California bike bar was a former law enforcement officer targeting his wife, three sources told NBC News.

The shooter was also dead after the incident at Cook’s Corner Bar in Trabuco Canyon just after 7 p.m., officials said.

Six people were also transported to hospitals, five of whom had gunshot wounds, the department said on the social media platform now known as X.

Responding Orange County sheriff’s deputies encountered a male with a gun and “a deputy-involved shooting occurred, and the male subject was pronounced deceased,” sheriff’s spokesman Sgt. Frank Gonzalez said.

The identities of the gunman or those killed were not immediately released.

Three law enforcement sources familiar with the investigation told NBC News that the gunman targeted his wife, but it was not clear if she was among the dead or injured. The sources stressed details were preliminary and did not identify where he previously worked.

Two of the injured were in critical condition, Providence Mission Hospital in Mission Viejo said in a statement. The other four were stable, it said.

A motive and more details about what occurred were not immediately clear. The investigation is going to take “quite a bit of time,” Gonzalez told reporters at an initial briefing Wednesday night.

Cook’s Corner advertises itself as one of the most famous biker bars in Southern California, and it goes back to the 1930s.

It opened in 1931 as a roadside hamburger restaurant, and later became a bar and was discovered by bikers in the 1970s, the Los Angles Times reported in a history of the establishment published in 2005.

Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office said they were aware of the shooting and coordinating with local officials.

State Sen. Catherine Blakespear, whose district includes Orange County, said she was “devastated” about the shooting. “My heart aches for those involved,” she wrote on social media. “My team and I are monitoring the situation and thank the first responders for their involvement at the scene.”

State Sen. Dave Min, who also represents the county, Called Cook’s Corner “a historic bar in the heart of Orange County.”

“Our district is one of the safest areas in the country, and yet we too are repeatedly afflicted with the scourge of mass shootings,” Min wrote.

Trabuco Canyon is a community of around 1,000 in the foothills in Orange County, about 12 miles east of Irvine.