Scott Beierle posed as a customer at a Florida yoga studio on Friday. Then he drew a gun.

A gunman who killed two women at a Florida yoga studio and wounded five other people before taking his own life had previously been accused of harassing young women, police say.

Authorities said they do not know why Scott Beierle, 40, opened fire on Friday afternoon after posing as a customer to join the class at the Hot Yoga studio in Tallahassee. Detectives are searching for links between him and the victims.

The bloodshed prompted the city’s mayor, Andrew Gillum, who is also Florida’s Democratic candidate for governor, to halt his campaign temporarily and return to Tallahassee.

The two women who died were identified as a student and a faculty member from Florida State University.

Police said Beierle was a graduate of FSU who served in the military, and that he had been the subject of calls to authorities in the Tallahassee area “related to harassment of young women”.

Two women who were wounded in the shooting remained in hospital in a stable condition on Saturday, police said. Two other shooting victims and a man who was pistol-whipped by Beierle were treated and released.

“There were indications that several people not only fought back but tried to save other people,” Tallahassee Police Chief Michael DeLeo said at a news conference.

City Commissioner Scott Maddox was on the scene. He said on Facebook, “In my public service career I have had to be on some bad scenes. This is the worst. Please pray.”

Elle Welling said she was leaving a liquor store across the street from the shopping centre and saw at least three people loaded into ambulances.

“You don’t think about this in Tallahassee and now you have to,” said Welling, 26, who lives in the neighbourhood.

The plaza is home to popular restaurants, a jewellery store, a framing shop, a hair salon and other businesses.

Erskin Wesson, 64, said he was eating dinner with his family at a restaurant located below the yoga studio when they heard the gunshots above them.

“We just heard ‘pow, pow, pow, pow,”‘ Wesson said. “It sounded like a limb falling on a tin roof and rolling.”

The restaurant’s owner came by a short time later, asking if anyone was a doctor, Wesson said. His step-daughter is an emergency room nurse and helped paramedics for about an hour, he said.

One of the women killed was identified as Nancy Van Vessem, 61, a doctor specialising in internal medicine who was a member of the faculty at Florida State University College of Medicine in Tallahassee.

The other was named as Maura Binkley, a 21-year-old student at FSU.

Their deaths were “just devastating to the FSU family,” said the university’s president, John Thrasher.

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