After seven people, including three teenagers, were shot outside a downtown hookah lounge early Sunday morning, Baltimore leaders are again looking for answers to stem what police are calling a “brazen” level of violent crime.
Two unidentified men — one armed with a rifle and the other, a handgun — approached a crowd of people standing in line outside the iVilla Hookah Lounge at 225 Park Ave. around 1:45 a.m. and opened fire, striking and wounding seven people, Baltimore police said.
The shootings came in the middle of a violent 24-hour stretch that included three fatal shootings in East Baltimore, but, in a nation grown too accustomed to such mass shootings, it scarcely registered in the national attention. In Chicago, moments before the Baltimore shooting, 13 were shot in a home on the south side of that city.
Elsewhere in Baltimore, a woman was shot to death late Sunday afternoon in a Patterson Park deli, following the Saturday evening shooting deaths of a woman in a McElderry Park hair salon and, three hours later and not far away, of a 21-year-old man. All three shootings were within a handful of blocks of one another.
"The level of violence late into this weekend is completely unacceptable,” said Mayor Bernard C. “Jack” Young in a Sunday afternoon statement.
Police had made no arrests as of Sunday evening and offered few details about each of the deadly shootings.
Baltimore Police Col. Richard Worley called the Baltimore gunmen in the downtown shooting “brazen" and said it spoke to the overall criminal culture in the city.
“I think it’s the same thing that the commissioner [Michael Harrison] has been saying all along. The criminals are just brazen,” he said. “This guy gets out of a car with a rifle, not even a handgun, walks up the street and just opens fire on a line of people.”
Responding officers found a 20-year-old man with gunshot wounds to his shoulder and hip, an 18-year-old man shot in both legs, a 27-year-old man with a wound to his arm, and a 17-year-old boy shot in the back and leg. The victims were taken to area hospitals for treatment. An additional three people — a 22-year-old man with a gunshot wound to a finger, a 17-year-old boy shot in an arm and another person — checked themselves into area hospitals.
Worley said the two shooters were with another man and a woman who did not shoot but who are considered suspects in the shooting.
The four suspects originally pulled up and parked a blue car on Saratoga Street nearby, Worley said, before the two shooters approached the crowd and fired at least 19 rounds.
Police later recovered the suspect’s vehicle in South Baltimore’s Cherry Hill neighborhood after it had been set on fire, Worley said.
Police have not determined a motive and Worley said none of those who were shot have spoken to police about potential suspects. All police have, Worley said, are physical descriptions of the suspects.
“We have no idea why they opened fire on a whole line of people,” Worley said.