At least six people, including a Pennsylvania state trooper, have been killed and dozens injured in a series of weekend violence and mass shootings across the United States.
The shootings in suburban Chicago, Washington, Pennsylvania, St. Louis, Southern California and Baltimore follow a spike in homicides and other violence in recent years that experts say , accelerated during the coronavirus pandemic.
“There’s no question there’s been a spike in violence,” said Daniel Nagin, a professor of public policy and statistics at Carnegie Mellon University. “Some of these cases appear to be just arguments, often between teenagers, and those arguments are with guns, not fists.”
Researchers disagree on the cause of the increase. Theories include the possibility that the violence is driven by the prevalence of guns in America, or by less aggressive police tactics or a drop in prosecutions for gun crimes, Nagin said.
On Sunday evening, none of the weekend’s events met the definition of a massacre, as fewer than four people died at each location. However, the number of injured in most cases meets the widely accepted definition of mass shootings.
Here is an overview of this weekend’s shoots:
WILLOWBROOK, ILLINOIS
One person was killed and at least 22 injured in a shooting early Sunday at a party in a suburban Chicago parking lot.
The DuPage County Sheriff’s Office described a “peaceful rally” to celebrate June 19 that suddenly turned violent in Willowbrook, about 20 miles southwest of Chicago.
The motive for the attack was not immediately known and, by early afternoon, no one had been arrested.
A witness, Markeshia Avery, said the celebration was meant to mark June 16, the federal Monday holiday commemorating the day in 1865 when slaves in Galveston, Texas, learned they had been freed – two years after the emancipation proclamation.
“We just started to hear gunshots, so we fell until they stopped,” Avery told WLS-TV.
WASHINGTON STATE
Two people were killed and two others were injured when a gunman began shooting ‘randomly’ into a crowd at a campground in Washington state where people were staying to attend a music festival in nearby Saturday night, police said.
The suspect was shot in a confrontation with law enforcement officers and taken into custody, several hundred meters from the Beyond Wonderland electronic dance music festival.
A public alert informed people of an active shooter in the area and advised them to “run, hide or fight”.
The festival continued through Sunday morning, Grant County Sheriff’s Office spokesman Kyle Foreman said. Organizers then posted a tweet saying Sunday’s concert was cancelled.
CENTRAL PENNSYLVANIA
A state trooper was killed and a second seriously injured within hours of each other in central Pennsylvania on Saturday.
A man engaged soldiers around 12:45 a.m. Saturday near Lewistown Barracks and shot a soldier who was seriously injured in hospital, Juniata County Police said.
The suspect fled but was found approximately two hours later several miles away in Walker Township. A gunfight erupted, killing the shooter and fatally wounding a second soldier, police said.
Neither the names of the soldiers nor those of the suspect were immediately released.
Governor Josh Shapiro said in a social media post that the injured officer was in critical but stable condition.
The governor said he and first lady Lori Shapiro “send our love to the family of the soldier killed today. May his memory be a blessing.”
ST. LOUIS
A Sunday morning shooting at a downtown St. Louis office building killed a 17-year-old and injured nine other teenagers, the city’s police commissioner said.
St. Louis Metropolitan Police Commissioner Robert Tracy identified the victim who was killed as 17-year-old Makao Moore. A spokesperson said a minor who had a handgun was in custody as a person of interest.
Teenagers were partying in an office when the shooting broke out around 1 a.m. Sunday.
The victims were between the ages of 15 and 19 and had injuries, including multiple gunshot wounds. A 17-year-old girl was stomped on as she ran away, seriously injuring her spine, Tracy said.
Casings from AR-type rifles and other firearms were strewn on the floor.
SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
A shooting at a pool party at a Southern California home left eight people injured, authorities said Saturday.
KABC-TV reported that authorities were dispatched shortly after midnight to Carson, Calif., south of Los Angeles.
The victims are between the ages of 16 and 24, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department said in a statement. They were taken to hospitals and two were listed in critical condition, the statement said.
Authorities said they found another 16-year-old boy with gunshot wounds when they responded to a call about a vehicle crashing into a nearby wall.
BALTIMORE
Six people were injured in a Friday night shooting in Baltimore. All had to survive.
Officers heard gunshots in the north of town just before 9 p.m. and found three men with multiple gunshot wounds. Doctors took them to area hospitals for treatment.
Police later learned that three other victims had entered area hospitals with non-life-threatening gunshot wounds.
The injured were between the ages of 17 and 26, Baltimore Police Department spokesman Lindsey Eldridge said.