Four people were killed and one was injured when multiple shooters opened fire at a house party near Los Angeles over the weekend, authorities said.
Police in Inglewood, a historically black city of about 100,000 near Los Angeles, responded to reports of shots being fired at a home around 1:30 a.m. Sunday, Inglewood Mayor James Butts, to reporters.
Two women and two men were shot and killed and another man was hospitalized in critical condition and is expected to survive, CBS2 reported.
Butts said the shooting appeared to have been a targeted “ambush” involving multiple weapons, including a rifle and a handgun. The mayor described the incident as the worst shooting crime in Inglewood since the 1990s.
The two men who were killed were identified in the news as Teron Whittiker, 21, Jayden Griffin, 21. The two women who were shot and killed are Breahna Stines, 20, and Marneysha Hamilton, 25, two sisters who were celebrating Stines’ birthday that night. The house was would have rented through Airbnb.
Sunday’s shooting comes as homicides, mostly with firearms, have risen sharply since the start of the pandemic. In the United States, homicides increased by 30% between 2019 and 2020, the biggest jump in a single year in 60 years that the FBI has been tracking this data. In California, homicides rose 30%, with 523 more homicides in 2020 than the year before. Black residents, despite making up 6% of California’s population, accounted for 31% of the state’s homicide victims.
The increase in shootings raised fears of a “surge in violent crime” after the start of the pandemic. The dynamics behind the increase continue to be studied. But, researchers, violence prevention practitioners and law enforcement officials said a range of pandemic-related developments were likely playing a role, including economic distress, collapsing social pillars in the community and the slowing of the courts.
The outbreak has affected localities large and small in all corners of the country, but the killings have not been evenly distributed along racial and socio-economic lines.
Although there are no official 2021 homicide data yet, the increase appears to have held steady, with cities from Oakland to Chicago continuing to see high numbers of murders that affect the cities’ most underserved neighborhoods.
Sunday’s deaths come as black residents and organizers in Inglewood and South Los Angeles cities, including Compton and Watts, continue to search for answers to the murder of Tioni Theusa 16-year-old boy found dead on the 110 freeway in Los Angeles on January 8.
Butts, the mayor of Inglewood, said police were looking for several people who may have been involved and urged potential suspects to turn themselves in. “We will find you and prosecute you,” he said.
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