Authorities are seeking several people suspected of firing into a crowd outside a Philadelphia bar Saturday night, wounding at least nine. The gunfire erupted just before 11 p.m. in the Kensington neighborhood, said First Deputy Police Commissioner John Stanford . “Multiple suspects” jumped out of a vehicle and opened fire on a crowd outside, then fled in the vehicle, Stanford said. The suspects “may have spotted someone that they wanted to shoot at, exited the vehicle and just began firing at the group of individuals that were there,” Stanford said, CNN reports.
All nine adult victims were transported to a hospital. Five of them, including a 24-year-old Hispanic man, a 25-year-old Black man, a 24-year-old Black man, and two white 40-year-old men, were listed in critical condition. The shooting took place in a high traffic area that was heavily patrolled by officers on Saturday night. A narcotics strike force had been conducting an operation further along the block earlier Saturday evening and officers from the team heard the shots. “We have some brazen individuals in this city that don’t care. They don’t care how many police officers are out here and some of them don’t care in terms of how many people are out here,” Stanford said. “We’ll try to gather video and hopefully be able to get some additional information as well as video surveillance that may be able to help us identify who was responsible for this.” There have been 585 mass shootings in the U.S. so far this year, defined as a shooting with four or more people injured, excluding the shooter, according to the Gun Violence Archive. At that rate, the number of mass shootings is likely to be similar to last year’s total of 691.
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