International

A tense standoff between the police and a gunman who had stormed into a California veterans home and taken three clinicians hostage came to a grim end Friday night when officers entered the room the gunman was in to find him and the hostages dead.

The man had shown up at the Veterans Home of California-Yountville in Napa County — the largest veterans home in the United States — in the morning with a rifle and exchanged gunfire with a sheriff’s deputy before crashing a farewell party for employees and taking a number of hostages.

The confrontation had stretched throughout the day and into the evening; officials said that some hostages had been released early on, but three remained trapped in a room with the gunman. Teams of federal, state and local law enforcement officials and hostage negotiators from three agencies had been unable to make contact with the gunman or the hostages throughout the day, officials said.