A mass shooting near a community event in Seattle Friday night left five people injured, two of whom were in critical condition, police said.
“We know that there’s dozens and dozens of rounds that were fired,” Seattle Police Department Chief Adrian Diaz told a news conference, adding that investigators were still working to establish whether “anybody was targeted.”
“We have five victims. Two are in critical condition. Three appear to be stable,” he said. He added, that they were taken to a nearby medical center and one victim was treated and discharged.
All of them were in their 20s, he said. A separate post on the department’s website said four of the victims were male and one was female.
Diaz said the shooter “focused their efforts on an area where there was actually a community event going on,” in the south of city.
He added that police in the city had recovered the highest number of guns in 15 years.
“The gun violence issues that we have in our city, we’ve seen it rise and sometimes slow down at times, but right now we’ve really got to get guns off our streets,” he said.
There were 65 incidents involving shootings or reports of shots being fired in Seattle last month, compared to 60 the previous year, according to police department data.
Although to date this year the total number shootings and shots fired is down by 8% compared with 2022, more shootings this year involved fatal injuries, the data shows.
“Community leaders are literally putting their lives on the line to protect their own community, and that is a tragedy” Seattle mayor Bruce Harrell said at the same news conference.
“What we’re trying to build here in Seattle is these fine officers working with fine community leaders, trying to protect our babies here, trying to protect our youth,” he added.
There have been 410 mass shootings in the U.S. in 2023, according to the Gun Violence Archive, a nonprofit that tracks incidents and which defines a mass shooting as a single incident in which at least four people — other than the shooter — are shot.
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