Utah High School Senior Shot and Killed at Party, Say Police

Stock photo of a police car. (Shutterstock)

A 17-year-old high school senior was shot and killed at a house party in Salt Lake County, Utah, but police haven’t identified a suspect.

The Unified Police Department said the shooting took place at 10:20 p.m. on Aug. 24 after someone called 911 and said the teen, identified as Kaylissa O'Leary, shot herself, Fox13 reported.

Police are investigating her cause of death as “suspicious.”

“There was a party going on. There was a gun at that party. We don’t know exactly what happened from then,” Unified Police Sgt. Melody Gray told the station.

Partygoers left the scene before police could talk to the people who were in the home at the time of the shooting.

“We are investigating this as a suspicious death because we do not know exactly who had that gun, we don’t know if she had it,” Gray told the news outlet.

Police are searching for the vehicle O'Leary had driven to the party. They described it as a 2010 blue Honda Civic with the Utah license plate number F944HG.

“What led up to this? Was it indeed an accident? Was it intentional? We don’t know at this point,” she told Fox13.

Police are now waiting for an autopsy report.

They told ABC4 that it’s not clear who owned the gun.

O’Leary was a student at Copper Hills High School in West Jordan, Utah.

People with information about the vehicle or the party can contact the Unified Police at 801-743-7000.

Police didn’t reveal any other details about the case.

Florida Man Kills 3

A Florida man killed three of his family members over the weekend in a gated community, according to reports.

According to the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, the shooting took place on the night of Aug. 25 in a home located in a community in Pembroke Pines, near Fort Lauderdale.

There, authorities found “multiple deceased victims, seemingly from gunshot wounds,” according to a press release from Pembroke Pines police.

Police and fire rescue crews were going to a “suspicious incident” at the same address when 911 dispatchers upgraded the call. They then “provided information that a male subject murdered family members and intended to end his own life,” Police Capt. Adam Feiner said in a news release, reported the newspaper.

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.