Four Dead, Four Injured in Shooting at California Halloween Party

Four people killed at a house party in the San Francisco Bay Area on the night of Oct. 31, 2019. (Video screenshot/CNN)

At least four dead and several people were wounded at a Halloween party in Orinda, California, according to media reports and local authorities.

The sheriff’s department in Contra Costa County confirmed that as of early Friday morning, four people died along with several injuries.

According to ABC7, citing local officials, four people were hurt in the incident.

Officials said they were called to a home at Lucille Way and Knickerbocker Lane around 10:45 p.m. local time.

Police confirmed that the shooting took place at a short-term rental location, and the station reported that a flyer went out advertising an Airbnb mansion Halloween party.

Officials said there were at least 100 people at the party when officials arrived.

Local authorities have not released any details about the victims, the suspect, or the hosts of the party.

A Street View photo shows Lucille Way and Knickerbocker Lane in Orinda, California (Google Street View)

Police told CBS San Francisco they were overwhelmed by the crowd when the shooting unfolded.

Facts About Crime in the United States

Violent crime in the United States has fallen sharply over the past 25 years, according to both the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports (UCR) and the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) (pdf).

The rate of violent crimes fell by 49 percent between 1993 and 2017, according to the FBI’s UCR, which only reflects crimes reported to the police.

The violent crime rate dropped by 74 percent between 1993 and 2017, according to the BJS’s NCVS, which takes into account both crimes that have been reported to the police and those that have not.

The FBI recently released preliminary data for 2018. According to the Preliminary Semiannual Uniform Crime Report, January to June 2018, violent crime rates in the United States dropped by 4.3 percent compared to the same six-month period in 2017.

While the overall rate of violent crime has seen a steady downward drop since its peak in the 1990s, there have been several upticks that bucked the trend. Between 2014 and 2016, the murder rate increased by more than 20 percent, to 5.4 per 100,000 residents, from 4.4, according to an Epoch Times analysis of FBI data. The last two-year period that the rate soared so quickly was between 1966 and 1968.