At least four people have died and others were injured after a gunman opened fire Saturday night at a teenage birthday party in a southern US town, police said.
The shootings occurred around 10:30 p.m. in Dadeville, a small town in Alabama, local authorities said, without indicating whether a suspect was in custody or the age of the victims.
“This act tragically claimed the lives of four people and left many injured,” state authority official Jeremy Burkett told a news conference.
Police leaked few details, but promised more information within hours.
An investigation is opened to clarify the circumstances of the tragedy and the motive of the shooter. Law enforcement believe an altercation led to the tragedy, according to local broadcaster WRBL.
The shots were aimed at the Mahogany Masterpiece, a downtown dance hall. A bullet hole was still visible on Sunday on the glass door of the building, surrounded by the famous yellow police banners.
A teenager celebrated her sixteenth birthday there on Saturday night, the Montgomery Advertiser newspaper reported. Her brother, a high school student, was among those killed, their grandmother told the daily.
He was a teenager without history, “who always had a smile”, she confided.
This drama “is something that no city should have to know”, regretted the police chief of Dadeville, Jonathan Floyd.
This small municipality of 3000 inhabitants is located in the rural South of the United States, northeast of Montgomery, capital of Alabama.
US President Joe Biden has been informed of these shootings and is monitoring the situation, the White House said.
Local politicians, for their part, expressed their “pain”. “Violent crime has no place in our state,” Alabama Governor Kay Ivey tweeted.
Senator Katie Britt said she was “heartbroken”.
Infernal cycle
The United States pays a very heavy price for the spread of firearms in its territory and the ease with which Americans have access to them.
Saturday evening, other shootings left at least two dead and four injured in a park in Louisville, Kentucky (east central), according to local police.
It is in this city that a young man had opened fire on Monday in the bank which employed him, killing five people. He had broadcast footage of the attack live on the Internet.
In late March, a person opened fire at a private elementary school in Nashville, neighboring Tennessee, killing three 9-year-old children and three employees before being shot dead by police.
Illustrating the hellish cycle of shootings America is trapped in, this weekend’s shootings in Alabama and Kentucky come exactly sixteen years after a massacre at Virginia Tech.
On April 16, 2007, an unhinged student shot dead 32 people on this campus in Blacksburg, before committing suicide.
The United States has more individual weapons than people. The consequence of this proliferation is the very high rate of death by firearm, without comparison with that of other developed countries.
It is now necessary that the number of victims be particularly important or the circumstances particularly significant so that shootings arouse national media interest.
Recent American history is indeed punctuated by killings, without any place of daily life seeming safe, from the company to the church, from the supermarket to the discotheque, from the public highway to public transport commmon.