The police say they arrested a 19-year-old man.
With four A man armed with a handgun killed two people and wounded five others when he opened fire on a crowd outside a high school graduation ceremony in Richmond, Virginia on Tuesday, local police said. The news agency Reuters reported on the topic.
The police say they arrested one suspect, a 19-year-old man who knew one of his victims. The perpetrator fired at a victim he knew into a crowd that had just arrived from the commencement ceremony for the Huguenot High School graduation ceremony.
The suspect will likely be charged with at least two counts of second-degree murder, Richmond’s interim police chief Rick Edwards told a press conference.
Edwards called the shooter’s behavior “disgusting and cowardly” because the shooting of the crowd appears to have been the result of a one-on-one dispute.
“When a gathering like this is targeted, innocent people are thrown into mayhem. That’s what happened today,” Edwards said.
“It’s obvious that this should be a safe space…It’s just incredibly tragic that someone decided to bring a gun to this party and sow terror in our community.”
Dead were 18- and 36-year-old men, Edwards says. He would not confirm a WWBT television news report that the victims were a father and son.
Among the wounded, a 31-year-old man received life-threatening injuries. The other four men, ages 14, 32, 55 and 58, are believed to be alive, Edwards said.
In addition, a 9-year-old girl was hit by a car in the chaos of the shooting, and several other people were injured when they fell or suffered anxiety from the incident, Edwards said.
The suspect fled the scene on foot. When the suspect was caught, he was in possession of four handguns, three of which were probably fired.
Case was the nation’s 279th mass shooting in the first 157 days of 2023, according to the Gun Violence Archive.
The archive’s statistics use the definition that it is a mass shooting when four or more people are shot in one incident, excluding the shooter.
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