A police officer was shot in a Fort Lauderdale, Florida, hotel during what could have been a planned ambush Thursday morning.
Three officers responded to a call around 7:20 a.m. from a Holiday Inn guest who claimed he killed someone inside a hotel room, Police Chief Bill Schultz said during a press conference.
Three responding officers couldn't make contact with anyone in the room before they entered. When the door flew open, a suspect opened fire, according to Schultz.
Police returned fire. One officer was shot, and a second was injured in the gun battle, Schultz said.
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The officer, who took a bullet, was rushed to a hospital in stable condition and expected to be OK, the chief said.
Another officer was treated for minor injuries at the scene. The third officer escaped unscathed.
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SWAT teams found the gunman dead in the room, but it's unclear if the gunman was killed in the gunfight or died by suicide.
No one else was in the room, said Schultz, who said the suspect was "a local, not a visitor."
The suspect's name hasn't been released yet, and the investigation is still in its infancy stages.
The Florida Department of Law Enforcement takes over the investigation, and the three officers who fired their weapons are placed on administrative leave, all of which are standard procedure for officer-involved shootings.
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The area around 17th Street and 15th Avenue intersection, where the Holiday Inn is located, remains blocked off in all directions, as of early Thursday afternoon.
Armored trucks were parked outside the hotel, and dozens of police vehicles were concentrated in and around the crime scene.
A hotel guest told the Sun Sentinel that the shooting appeared to start on the pool deck right above the hotel's parking garage.
"We’re moving down here. We were waking up to have breakfast at the hotel, and staff pushed everyone into an event room," hotel guest Alexis Boettcher, who is visiting from Cleveland, told the local newspaper.
"I came downstairs. They told me there was an active shooter and I couldn’t go back in the building."
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Fort Lauderdale is in the middle of a busier-than-usual spring break this year, after an influx of party seekers ventured up Florida's coast because of Miami Beach's "break up" with the annual March madness.
Law enforcement have not said if there is any connection between spring break and the shooting.
Before this incident, Fort Lauderdale police told Fox News Digital there were 13 spring break-related arrests from March 1 to 17, and it has been a peaceful spring break season, with no major incidents.
