6 Shot Dead by Neighbor at Building Near Miami Gaston De Cardenas/Reuters A gunman was killed by a police SWAT team Saturday at a Hialeah, Fla., apartment complex. HIALEAH, Fla. - A gunman shot and killed six of his neighbors and held two other people hostage during an eight-hour standoff before a police SWAT team raided an apartment and fatally shot him early Saturday morning, law enforcement officials said. The two hostages were rescued unharmed. The gunman, identified as Pedro Vargas, 43, lived in the apartment complex northwest of downtown Miami with his mother, according to neighbors. They said Mr. Vargas had been embroiled in a dispute with the building's managers, a husband-and-wife team who were among the dead. The police said the episode began around 6:30 p.m. Friday when Mr. Vargas set fire to his apartment and began roaming the complex, shooting at his neighbors. By the time the authorities realized they were facing something more than a fire and police officers responded, the six victims were probably already dead, a police spokesman said. "Vargas ran throughout the building, firing shots at random in a very irrational fashion," Detective Carl Zogby of the Hialeah Police Department told reporters. The gunman eluded the police for several hours inside the apartment complex, occasionally exchanging gunfire with SWAT members, before barricading himself in the apartment of a couple on the fourth floor, Mr. Zogby said. "No one seems to know why he acted the way he acted," said Mr. Zogby, whose officers recovered a 9-millimeter pistol that Mr. Vargas had apparently used. "He still had plenty of live rounds of ammunition," Mr. Zogby said. This could have been a much greater tragedy. All but one of the six victims lived in the apartment complex, a series of beige and yellow structures in a predominantly Cuban residential neighborhood lined with oak trees. A man who lived across the street was killed as he arrived home with his two children. They were not injured. In all, four men and three women were killed, including the gunman, who had been holding the two hostages, a Pakistani couple, according to neighbors, in the evacuated 96-unit apartment building when negotiations with a SWAT team broke down. The dead included a 17-year-old girl, identified by The Associated Press as Priscila Perez. The police said the other victims were the property managers, Italo Pisciotti, 79, and his wife, Camira Pisciotti, 69; the neighbor from across the street, Carlos Javier Gavilanes, 33; Patricio Simono, 64; and Merly S. Niebles, 51. The gunman's mother was not present when he set fire to the apartment, the police said. Shamira Pisciotti, the managers" daughter, told WFOR-TV, the CBS affiliate in Miami, that there had been a complaint of some sort and that her parents had gone to check it out. "I heard about 15 to 20 shots, and so I went outside, and my neighbors were screaming that my parents have been shot," Ms. Pisciotti told the television station. Neighbors said they saw her crying shortly after the shooting erupted. Other residents of the apartment complex said the barrage of gunfire had startled them from the peaceful dinnertime activities of a Friday evening. "I'm used to seeing gunfire on TV," said Pedro Failde, 81, who lives in the building east of where the shootings occurred. But this was something else - boom, boom. It sounded like 10 shots from an AK-47. I got away from the window very quickly. Mr. Failde's companion, Elizabeth Villalobos, described the whole experience as "terrible." Another resident, Juan Carlos Arteaga, 51, said the shootings "sounded like a war." He led a reporter to a landing outside the gunman's apartment, where a charred doorway bore signs of the fire Mr. Vargas had apparently set. On a nearby landing, someone had set up a small shrine to the dead, with three candles in a glass, heart-shaped ashtray, surrounded by red roses. Lizette Alvarez contributed reporting from Miami.