WASHINGTON — Nine people outside enjoying the Independence Day festivities in the nation’s capital were shot and wounded early Wednesday, police said, as a spate of violence marred the holiday.
Officers responding around 1 a.m. to the mass shooting in a neighborhood about a 20-minute drive east of the White House found a 10-year-old and a 17-year-old among the victims, police said. The victims, who were not publicly identified, were hospitalized with injuries that weren’t considered life-threatening,
The gunshots were fired from a dark SUV seen driving through the Deanwood neighborhood.
Metropolitan Police Department Assistant Chief Leslie Parsons said the shootings appeared to be targeted, and called the violence “totally unacceptable.”
It was unclear if there was more than one shooter in the vehicle, and no arrests had been made, said police, who appealed to the public for information to help in their investigation.
“We have too many guns and too many violent people on the street,” said Washington Mayor Muriel Bowser Wednesday afternoon. “We have work to do.”
The Washington shooting was the latest in a string of mass shootings over a violent July Fourth weekend.
Thirty people were shot, two fatally, at a block party in Baltimore early Sunday. Many of the shooting victims were children, authorities said.
On Monday night, a shooter in a bulletproof vest opened fire on the streets of Philadelphia, killing five people and wounding two boys, ages 2 and 13, before he surrendered, police said.
Three people were killed and eight others were injured when several men fired indiscriminately into a crowd of hundreds that had gathered in a Texas neighborhood following a festival in the area, authorities said. The shooting in the Fort Worth neighborhood of Como happened late Monday night, about two hours after the annual ComoFest ended.
And in Florida, a 7-year-old child was killed in a shooting during an altercation between two groups gathered for July Fourth celebrations along a causeway that crosses Tampa Bay, police said. A man also was hit with gunfire but was expected to survive. The child was pronounced dead at a hospital.
