Authorities were investigating whether a man who was shot and killed Monday morning by police in North Carolina may be linked to the slayings of five people in South Carolina in a week.

South Carolina law enforcement officers were in Gaston County, N.C., near Charlotte, after county police shot and killed the man, who they said opened fire on them Monday morning, NBC News’ Ron Mott reported.

Investigators told NBC station WCNC of Charlotte that a gray or champagne Ford Explorer was found outside the house in Gaston County, about 30 miles north of Cherokee County, S.C., where five people were found shot to death in three incidents over eight days bridging last week.

Cherokee County Sheriff Bill Blanton said Monday that a gray Ford Explorer was believed to link all five of the South Carolina killings.

“The physical evidence, the evidence that we have, the eyewitnesses that we have, puts the same person, we think the same vehicle, at all three locations,” Blanton said in an interview on NBC’s TODAY.

Questioning three people
Gaston County police were questioning three people who were reported to have entered a house about 2:40 a.m. when they discovered that one of them had an outstanding warrant. The man, whose identity was not released, fired a single shot when officers tried to serve the warrant, injuring one of the officers in the leg. Police fired four shots, killing the man at the scene, they said.

The killings began a week ago Saturday in Cherokee County, S.C., when the wife of Kline Cash, a 63-year-old peach farmer, found her husband shot to death in their rural home. Then, on Wednesday, relatives discovered the bodies of Gena Linder Parker, 50, and her mother, Hazel Linder, 83, bound and shot to death in a separate attack at Linder’s home.

Thursday, Stephen Tyler and his daughter Abby, 15, were shot as they were closing the Tyler Home Center near downtown Gaffney. He died Thursday, while Abby Tyler fought for her life for two days before dying Saturday at a hospital.

Blanton said deputies were searching for a man about 6 feet 2 inches tall with salt-and-pepper hair.

Hundreds of people thronged funeral services Sunday for the mother and daughter. Law enforcement officers provided security for the family and mourners. The crime spree terrorizing Cherokee County forced many people to curtail Fourth of July festivities.

Celebration turns to mourning
The Herald-Journal of Spartanburg, S.C., reported that the Tylers’ minister at Cherokee Avenue Baptist Church, Clyde Thomas, urged congregants to keep the faith in the face of tragedy. The newspaper said he had a pistol in his office Saturday.
“As Christians, we don’t live by explanations. We live by promises. We live by faith, not sight,” Thomas said.
Thomas said he had originally planned to deliver a sermon titled “Happy Birthday, America” for the Fourth of July service. But instead of upbeat patriotic music, Sunday’s program was changed to add hymns reflecting a time of mourning.

The killings alarmed many residents, and some talked of arming themselves.
“The irony is that the freedoms we have, we’re locked behind closed doors with firearms,” Thomas said. “We should be celebrating freedom, but we find ourselves very much restrained by fear.”
Blanton, the sheriff, said all the victims were shot. The shootings all occurred within about 10 miles of each other in Cherokee County, a community of 54,000 people set amid peach orchards and farms.

Investigators have released a sketch of the suspect, saying he was in his 40s and roughly 200 pounds.

More on South Carolina

"Smith and Rohrer ordered Plaintiff to remove her pro-life T-shirt and instructed Plaintiff to never wear her pro-life T-shirt at McSwain Elementary School ever again...
"Completely humiliated and held out for ridicule, Plaintiff complied with Defendants' directives and removed her pro-life T-shirt, whereupon, Defendants seized and confiscated it. Defendants did not return Plaintiff's property until the end of the school day."
The school administrators dispute some of the allegations, said Anthony N. DeMaria, attorney for the McSwain Union Elementary School District.
"I think the school district has a very strong defense," DeMaria said. "The complaint does not properly characterize the events that happened. Certainly we dispute some of the events."
He said he was unable to reach the administrators to determine which parts they say are incorrect, because school is out for the summer. Rohrer, the principal, told FOXNews.com on Monday that she could not issue a statement without consulting with the school superintendent and their attorney. The other defendants and school district employees did not respond to calls and e-mails from FOXNews.com.
The school district sought to get the case thrown out due to "failure to state a cognizable claim," but a U.S. Eastern District Court judge ruled last month that all but one of Amador's claims could go forward.
The complaint quotes school district officials saying that they ordered Amador's daughter to remove the shirt because it constituted "inappropriate subject matter" in violation of the school's dress code, which bans clothing with "suggestion of tobacco, drug or alcohol use, sexual promiscuity, profanity, vulgarity, or other inappropriate subject matter."
Amador claims in the legal complaint that other students at the school have been allowed to wear expressive shirts, and she blames the school for “inconsistently applying their Dress Code based upon subjective determinations as to which messages are acceptable and which messages are not.”
One of the girl's lawyers, Mark A. Thiel, said that the images on her shirt of a fetus in the womb were same as those in her science textbooks. He said no student had complained about the shirt, and he said the girl's parents were not called when the incident took place.
"This was a young girl, not even in high school. But they didn't call," he said.
A spokeswoman for the local Planned Parenthood chapter declined to take sides in the case.
"Even offensive speech is protected as long as it doesn’t impinge upon the rights of others," said Deborah Ortiz, vice president of public affairs for Planned Parenthood Mar Monte.
"School administrators have a mission to educate, and the student’s right to political speech should be protected in balance with this education mission."
UCLA law professor and First Amendment expert Eugene Volokh said Supreme Court precedent appears to support the girl's case.
"During the Vietnam War, the Supreme Court ruled that wearing black arm bands [at school, to protest the war] was OK,” Volokh said. “If students can wear armbands in protest, why can't they wear a pro-life shirt?"
He said the case would be different if there was evidence that the shirt could have led to disruption or fighting.
"Schools have a lot more authority than the government does in regulating speech,” he said. “If someone is speaking on a street corner and it looks like other people are going to start a fight over it, the government's job is to protect the speaker. That is not the case in schools. We need to make sure students learn. So if speech is highly disruptive, well … in that case we can suppress it.
"But the school's position that they can restrict speech just because they find it inappropriate is not correct."
But the fact that it's a K-8 school with very young children could change things, said Brooklyn Law School professor William Araiza. He pointed to the 2007 Supreme Court decision in Morse v. Frederick, where the court allowed a high school to suspend students in Juneau, Alaska, who waved a banner that read “Bong hits 4 Jesus” from across the street during an Olympic torch relay, because it was seen as promoting illegal drug use.
“[The school] could almost use a “bong hits” kind of rationale about protecting students from inappropriate messages,” Araiza said. “For instance, would you allow a 4th grader to wear a gruesome picture of a bomb scene? You probably wouldn't.”
First Amendment attorney William Becker, who represents Amador, disagreed that the shirt could be seen as containing inappropriate messages.
"The message of the T-shirt is that life is sacred," he said. "One would be very hard pressed to find anything wrong with that particular idea, except that some people do object to the political message.”