But family members waited outside the police lines seeking news about missing loved ones.

Among them was Pamela Harris, who said her daughter had called her at 2:15am to say that her 38-year-old son, Sergio, had been shot and killed outside a nightclub.

“She said he was dead. I just collapsed,” Ms Harris told Reuters. She said she was still waiting on official confirmation from police, adding, “I cannot leave here now until I know what’s going on. I’m not going anywhere. It seems like a dream.”

Berry Accius, a community activist, said that he came to the scene shortly after the shooting happened.

“The first thing I saw was like victims. I saw a young girl with a whole bunch of blood in her body, a girl taking off glass from her, a young girl screaming saying, ‘They killed my sister.’ A mother running up, ‘Where’s my son, has my son been shot?'” he said.

The shooting – which occurred just two blocks from the state Capitol – was decried by top political officials.

“What we do know at this point is that another mass casualty shooting has occurred, leaving families with lost loved ones, multiple individuals injured and a community in grief,” Gavin Newsom, California’s governor, said. “The scourge of gun violence continues to be a crisis in our country, and we must resolve to bring an end to this carnage.”

Sunday’s violence was the second mass shooting in Sacramento in the last five weeks. On February 28, a father killed his three daughters, a chaperone and himself in a church during a weekly supervised visitation.

David Mora, 39, was armed with a homemade semiautomatic rifle-style weapon, though he was under a restraining order that barred him from possessing a firearm.