A shooting at a strip mall early Saturday in Phoenix, Arizona, left a 14-year-old girl dead and eight others injured, with two being treated for life-threatening injuries, according to Phoenix police.
Injuries sustained by others, including a teenage boy, are not life-threatening and they were all transported to local hospitals.
The shooting happened sometime after midnight in the northwest of downtown Phoenix after an altercation between multiple parties escalated into a violent confrontation. Victims were all aged between 17 and 24.
Authorities are attempting to piece together eyewitness accounts. No suspects have been immediately identified and no arrests have been made yet.
Phoenix Police Department Sgt. Andy Williams said during a news conference that a fight started in a “large gathering” of around 100 people which then escalated. The 1 a.m. shooting happened inside the mall premises as well in the parking lot and the roadway, sending people running near 10th Avenue and Hatcher Road.
“Many rounds were shot into this crowd of people as everyone fled the area,” Williams said.
“In that little strip mall, there’s some little recording studio or something. That’s where the parties were happening at. The prior two times they had parties, they had shootings also,” Chad Martinez, who also lives nearby, told the media outlet.
Besides the mall incident, there were two other shootings in Phoenix around the same time. In both shootings, two separate victims were shot and pronounced dead—one, a teenage boy near 13th and Vogel avenues, and the other, a man in a vehicle near 39th and Grand avenues. It is not clear whether the deadly incidents were related.
The latest Phoenix episode follows the Uvalde elementary school massacre of 19 students and two teachers.
