Rival gunmen started shooting at each other in a crowded downtown nightlife district in Alabama’s capital city Saturday night, killing two people and injuring 12 others, police said.
At a news conference Sunday afternoon, Montgomery Police Chief James Graboys identified those who died as 17-year-old Jeremiah Morris and 43-year-old Shalonda Williams. He said five of the injured were hospitalized with life-threatening injuries, and the remaining seven had injuries that weren’t considered life-threatening. The youngest victim was 16 and seven altogether were younger than 20, Graboys said.
Police were called around 11:30 p.m. to what Graboys described as a “mass shooting.”
“This was two parties involved that were basically shooting at each other in the middle of a crowd,” Graboys told reporters.
The shooters, he said, “did not care about the people around them when they did it.”
Graboys said investigators were combing through evidence and interviewing potential suspects, although no one had been charged early Sunday.
“We will do everything we need to gather every bit of evidence to chase down whoever is involved,” Graboys said.
The shooting happened on a busy night in the city’s tourist district, shortly after a football game between Tuskegee University and Morehouse College, said Montgomery Mayor Steven Reed. Many visitors had traveled to Montgomery over the weekend for the game as well as the Alabama National Fair, which the city hosted. Various attractions were set up in the downtown area for the festivities, including a Ferris wheel.
Reed pledged to find and arrest those responsible for the shooting as well as anyone “connected to” the attack.
“For us, this is not acceptable,” he said. “We’re not going to normalize this.”
The mayor emphasized during Sunday’s news conference that the shooting was unrelated to any of the sporting or community events that took place in Montgomery. Graboys spoke to the same point, telling reporters that law enforcement believes one of the 14 people shot was intentionally targeted.
“An exchange of gunfire erupted,” the police chief said. “When that exchange erupted, multiple people in the crowd, because it was a crowded area, pulled their own weapons and started discharging. As you can imagine, that could be a very chaotic situation.”
Authorities recovered shell casings from multiple weapons at the scene of the shooting, in addition to several different weapons, said Graboys. He said at least two people are known to have been armed during the incident.
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