As mourners began to say goodbye to two teenagers who were fatally shot at a weekend party, Pittsburgh police continued to work on what Chief Scott Schubert called “a complex investigation” that requires more people to come forward with what they know .
The funeral of 17-year-old Jaiden Brown took place on Friday. The day before, hundreds of people turned out to visit the teenager.
Jaiden and Mathew Steffy-Ross, 17, were killed in the gunfire that broke out at a party of about 200 people at the rental unit on the corner of Suismon Street and Madison Avenue.
A private service for Steffy-Ross will be held on Saturday.
The shooting and its aftermath reached far beyond Woodland Hills, where Brown was a student, and Phase 4 in East Liberty, which Steffy-Ross attended.
“These kids need someone to help them through what they’ve witnessed,” said Richard Garland, a University of Pittsburgh professor and director of the Violence Prevention Project.
Garland said she visited students at Penn Hills High School and Westinghouse High School this week.
“The kids are feeling it,” he said, noting that he had referred several families to local mental health centers. He said talking to students who were at the party but uninjured felt the same as when he went to trauma centers to talk with gunshot victims.
“It’s like a rude awakening for some of them,” Garland said. “It could be an epiphany.”
He said the girls he spoke to were more open about what they saw and what happened.
The boys, however, “they’re like, ‘I’ll never do anything like that again.’ They say they should have turned around and left. There were so many people in the house that they couldn’t turn around and leave.
The house was so tight, Garland said they told her, the children were being stepped on.
“It was like a stampede.”
Schubert said this week that some revelers jumped out of windows trying to escape the gunfire. Five were injured trying to escape.
“The majority of this large crowd appeared to be under 21,” Schubert said. βA lot of them were there just to have a good time. Sadly, with guns, we saw the tragic results of this party and what it did to our city.
He declined on Friday to say whether investigators had any suspects, or say how many shooters would be involved. Schubert has previously said the shell casings – which include evidence that an AR-15 type rifle was used – indicate that multiple guns and therefore multiple shooters were involved.
βIt is a complex investigation. There is a lot to go,β Schubert said on Friday. “I know people will be like, ‘Oh, there’s all kinds of stuff on social media,’ which is great…but we have to piece it all together. We have a lot of protocols that we have to follow to file a complaint against someone.
Shooting happened just after 12:30 a.m. Easter Sunday.
A Pittsburgh police officer responded to the rental unit around 11 p.m. for a noise complaint. Authorities said the officer asked to speak to a resident and a man came downstairs to meet the officer at the door. The man who came to the door turned the music down and was warned to keep it on. Schubert said earlier this week that officers responding to noise complaints often don’t ask for identification or proof of residency or ownership.
Schubert said the officer saw nothing unusual that would indicate trouble was brewing.
Just over 90 minutes later, police received ShotSpotter notifications for dozens of rounds in the area, and an officer announced on the radio that there was a large party going on there that he had checked earlier, presumably during the noise complaint.
Authorities said at least 50 shots were fired inside the house and as many outside. Police described a complex scene that spanned city blocks and found injured revelers in multiple locations in the area.
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