Officials, investigators, and stunned residents of a West Philadelphia neighborhood that has experienced more than its share of violence were left to spend the celebratory weekend making sense of one of the deadliest mass shootings in the city’s history. After five people, including a 15-year-old boy, were killed Monday night, and a 2-year-old and 13-year-old were seriously wounded in a shooting spree that covered several blocks in the Kingsessing area, a “frustrated and outraged” Mayor Jim Kenney said the nation needs to find out “how to get guns out of dangerous people’s hands," the Philadelphia Inquirer reports.
It was the highest death toll in a single shooting since the Lex Street Massacre in 2000, in which seven people, including a 15-year-old, were shot and killed in a West Philadelphia drug house. The motive in Monday’s shootings was unclear. It was unknown what connection, if any, the alleged killer — Kimbrady Carriker, 40, — had with the victims. The assailant evidently acted alone, said Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw, and the shootings had a disturbingly random quality, according to Ernest Ransom, head of the police homicide unit.
Wearing body armor, a ski mask, and wielding an AR-15-style assault rifle, the shooter was seen firing “aimlessly” at occupied vehicles and pedestrians, said Ransom. The shooter fired at a car being driven by a mother who was taking her twins home and injured one of the children, who suffered a gunshot wound to the legs, said Ransom. The other twin suffered injuries to the eyes from glass. After a foot chase, officers cornered the shooter in an alleyway. The suspect was found with a handgun, multiple magazines of ammunition, and a police scanner. Cianni Rosette, who lived with Carriker for a year, said he showed her a handgun several times and “was trying to get me comfortable around guns and stuff like that."