At least five people were shot dead on Thursday by a 15-year-old in a residential neighborhood in Raleigh, the capital of North Carolina, said Mayor Mary-Ann Baldwin. Hours after the bombing, President Joe Biden said “enough”.
The boy was arrested and is hospitalized in serious condition, according to police, who did not say how he was injured or his name. Authorities still don’t know the motive for the attack, which turned a quiet middle-class neighborhood into a 2-mile-long crime scene.
The suspect began shooting at 5 pm (local time) on the streets of the Hedingham neighborhood, where residents were told to stay indoors for hours while police searched for the shooter. He was found near the Neuse River Greenway, a hiking and biking trail where he shot more people. Police arrested him at a residence near the trail.
“Nobody should feel that fear in the communities. Nobody,” the governor, Democrat Roy Cooper, told a news conference. He called the incident an “infuriating and tragic act of gun violence”.
Three women – aged 52, 49 and 35 – and a 16-year-old boy were killed. Another victim is a 29-year-old police officer, Gabriel Torres, who was on his way to work when he was shot and died. Two people were injured: a police officer who was treated and released and a 59-year-old woman, now hospitalized in critical condition.
As of Friday morning, streets in the neighborhood were blocked off with yellow tape to seal off crime scenes, and patrol cars remained parked outside several homes, local media footage showed. Police in Raleigh, a city of 500,000, are expected to produce a report on the crime within the next five days.
Biden condemned the attack and said there was so much gun violence that some murders are no longer news. “Enough is enough. We grieve and pray with the many families who have had to bear the terrible burden of these mass shootings,” the Democrat said in a statement Friday. He reiterated his call for a ban on assault weapons and said federal police were assisting with the investigation.
The president wants to reinstate the ban on semiautomatic weapons, which ran in the US from 1994 to 2004. But the Republican opposition blocks the bill in the name of the constitutionally guaranteed right to bear arms.
About 49,000 people died from gunshot wounds in the United States in 2021, compared with 45,000 in 2020, a year in which a record had already been broken.
The North Carolina attack comes on the heels of a number of others with firearms. In May, a man murdered 19 children and two teachers at an elementary school in Texas, just days after a gunman killed 10 people in Buffalo, New York. Two months later, seven people were killed during a July 4th Independence Day parade in Illinois.
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