The shooter who killed five people along a walking trail in North Carolina’s capital city is a 15-year-old boy who has been hospitalized in critical condition, police said Friday.
Raleigh Police Chief Estella Patterson told reporters that the suspect opened fire Thursday on a greenway in an area northeast of downtown. He then eluded officers for hours before he was cornered in a home and arrested, police said.
A 16-year-old boy and an off-duty police officer were among those killed.
Authorities didn’t offer any details on a motive.
An off-duty police officer was among those killed Thursday by the suspect, who police only described as a white, juvenile male. He was arrested around 9:37 p.m., authorities said. His identity and age weren’t released. North Carolina law defines a juvenile as anyone under age 18.
The gunfire broke out around 5 p.m. along the Neuse River Greenway in a residential area northeast of downtown, Raleigh Mayor Mary-Ann Baldwin said. Officers from numerous law enforcement agencies swarmed the area, closing roads and warning residents to stay inside while they searched for the shooter.
Two people, including another police officer, were taken to hospitals. The officer was later released, but the other survivor remained in critical condition.
“Tonight, terror has reached our doorstep. The nightmare of every community has come to Raleigh. This is a senseless horrific and infuriating act of violence that has been committed,” Gov. Roy Cooper told reporters.
Authorities didn’t offer any details on a motive, but Baldwin joined Cooper in decrying the violence.
“We must stop this mindless violence in America, we must address gun violence,” the mayor said. “We have much to do, and tonight we have much to mourn.”
Early Friday, authorities searched a house a couple of streets over from where the shooting happened, WRAL-TV said.
The Raleigh shooting was the latest in a violent week across the country. Five people were killed Sunday in a shooting at a home in Inman, South Carolina. On Wednesday night two police officers were fatally shot in Connecticut after apparently being drawn into an ambush by an emergency call about possible domestic violence. Police officers have been shot this week in Greenville, Mississippi; Decatur, Illinois; Philadelphia, Las Vegas and central Florida. Two of those officers, one in Greenville and one Las Vegas, were killed.
Thursday’s violence was the 25th mass killing in 2022 in which the victims were fatally shot, according to The Associated Press/USA TODAY/Northeastern University Mass Killings database. A mass killing is defined as when four or more people are killed excluding the perpetrator.
Brooke Medina, who lives in the neighborhood bordering the greenway, was driving home at around 5:15 p.m. when she saw about two dozen police cars, both marked and unmarked, race toward the residential area about 9 miles (14 kilometers) from Raleigh’s downtown. She then saw ambulances speeding the other direction, toward the closest hospital.
She and her husband, who was working from home with their four children, started reaching out to neighbors and realized there was a shelter-in-place order.
The family closed all of their window blinds, locked the doors and congregated in an upstairs hallway together, said Medina, who works as a communications vice president at a think tank. The family listened to the police scanner and watched local news before going back downstairs once the danger seemed to have moved further away from their home.
“We’re just going to hunker down for the rest of the night and be very vigilant. Keep all of our lights on, doors locked,” she said.
She described the neighborhood known as Hedingham as a sprawling, dense, tree-lined community that’s full of single-family homes, duplexes and townhomes that are more moderately priced compared to other parts of the Raleigh area.
Allison Greenawalt, 29, who also lives in the neighborhood, said she was sitting on the couch with her cat around 5 p.m. when she heard “three shots in a pretty rapid succession.” She said police arrived quickly and that she’s grateful that they were there during the chaotic hours while she sheltered inside. Her husband, meanwhile, tried to drive home from work after the shooting and was turned away by police who had closed nearby streets, and he didn’t make it home until around 10:30 p.m., she said.
“I was sitting in our house with the lights turned off and the windows closed for the majority of the evening, just waiting to hear that” the shooter had been arrested, she said.
(AP)
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5 Responses
So cares so many people were killed.
The only thing that matters is that we honor the 2nd amendment!
It’s more important and holy than anyone life.
(Hashem Yerachem!)
Guns do not kill. A society that is rotted at it’s core, that does not believe in God, that does not value life, a society that sees violence all day in movies and plays violent games will end up with 25 mass killing murderers within a few months. In Israel in the Jewish, Druze and Christian communities a big percentage of people carry guns and there are no mass shooters. While the gun violence committed by Muslim Arabs is extremely high. It is not the guns that’s the problem- it’s the society. The less people value life, the more violent they become.
What does it mean that they didn’t specify the type of firearm used?
Long Island Yid – take your arguments to Chicago, New York, Philly, Detroit, LA.
Go get their guns! Go ahead!
LI Yid, yes, our fundamental freedoms, protected by the Bill of Rights, are more important than any individual’s life. If you don’t think so, then you should support censoring any mention of such crimes, in order to prevent copycat crimes; you should support banning the Moslem religion, for obvious reasons; you should support locking suspected criminals up without a fair trial; you should support allowing the police to search anyone and anything without a warrant; in fact you should support locking up every black male between the ages of 15 and 45, regardless of whether they’ve done anything wrong. There can be no question that each of these measures would save lives, and yet no sane person would advocate any of them, because they violate our freedoms, which are more important than lives.
Also, if you think lives are more important than our freedoms then you must oppose our nation’s founders who fought and killed and died in order to establish those freedoms, and all the soldiers throughout the years who found and killed and died in order to maintain them. According to you they should have refused to fight and instead submitted to our various enemies from the British through the Germans, in order to save lives.