Investigators say a police officer on patrol near the club heard several gun shots and discovered four men with gunshot wounds.

Three were flown to a Springfield hospital for treatment. The conditions of the four men have not been released.

While investigating the shooting, the Pulaski County sheriff's department arrested two men believed to be at the scene; they face unrelated drug charges.

When he was arrested in Chicago, Brown was with Susannah Pimentel, who hadn't been seen since the shooting. Police say the pair was huddled together, hiding in the stairwell of a building where Brown's family lives.

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Here's how Pulaski County Sheriff J.B. King described the crime and the investigation in his weekly column that he sends out by e-mail:

Our incident started a few minutes after midnight as the Friday night shift turned into the early Saturday morning shift. There were two St. Robert City Police Officers on routine patrol on the spur and they were near the Oasis Club when they heard a number of gunshots. They immediately turned into the club parking lot and they were also immediately overwhelmed by an estimated 300 people who were fleeing the club as fast as they could. They could see gunshot victims down inside the front door of the club. The officers issued a “send us every officer you can find call”.  I believe St. Robert had five officers on duty at the time.

The Sheriff’s Department had just completed a shift change and we only had two Deputies on duty. They were dispatched to the scene. Our call out procedure was implemented by dispatch. Within 20 minutes we had 12 Deputies on scene. Some were Deputies who had just gone off duty from the Friday shift, some were Deputies on their day off and some were Command staff. Over the next two hours 5 more Deputies and one extra jail staff member reported for duty. We ended up with 17 Deputies and the Jail Administrator working the incident.

Four members of the reserve Detective unit reported in for duty. Three of them have cars assigned and they went straight to the scene. The fourth had to come to the office and it took him some time to find a car he could use.

I will not talk about the details of the St. Robert Police investigation nor about parts of our investigation but it will be sufficient to say that we had multiple crime scenes at multiple locations that needed to be processed for evidence by Detectives. There were I believe a total of 7 Detectives available counting the St. Robert Detectives. We needed about 15 to cover everything.

There were four gunshot victims at the club. Three had wounds that were serious to critical in nature. So we had lots of EMS people on the scene. With 300 possible witnesses to the shooting there was no way we could talk to or ID everyone who was there when the shots were fired. I believe the correct word is chaos. However numerous leads were developed very quickly. These leads sent officers and Deputies to several other locations. Within a few minutes we had priority jobs waiting for the next available officer and we were out of officers. We could have used 40 officers with ease.

Everyone who reported to the scene took his or her orders from the St. Robert City Police Department’s Operations Lieutenant who was in charge. One of the jobs he assigned was to locate a possible suspect in the shooting at a residence off Hackney Road, which is in the County outside the city limits. Two Deputies responded to that location. As they drove up to the house people were leaving. The Deputies made contact with them and while questions were being asked one Deputy noticed that there was a rifle and a pistol on the ground under the car next to these possible suspects.

Then the situation got worse. Another vehicle approached the house, saw the Deputies, and turned to leave. That turned out to be an older male with a 15-year-old female and drugs in the vehicle. They said they were not involved in the shooting they were just stopping there to buy more drugs. This touched off a daylong effort by the Reserve Detective Unit of the Pulaski County Sheriff’s Department to apply for and serve a total of four search warrants on both ends of the apartment duplex in question. I believe they finished by 4 p.m. Saturday. And, yes, the search warrants were a success with guns, ammo, and drugs recovered.

While all of this was going on we were also looking for a person of interest in this incident and we had searched high and low for him all night. Once we got to a point Saturday afternoon where we could spare officers we sent them home for some sleep because we had already reached the conclusion that a retaliation shooting would be possible on the Saturday evening/Sunday morning shift and we were going to use all hands once again.