(Los Angeles) Six teens between the ages of 14 and 18 were hospitalized after a Monday shooting near a high school in Aurora, Colo., But their lives did not appear to be in danger, city police said.
The perpetrators of the shooting, which could have been linked to gangs, were still at large on Monday afternoon.
According to Aurora Police Chief Vanessa Wilson, the six victims of the shootings were all schoolchildren attending school at a facility near the park where the shooting took place.
One of them had to undergo “emergency surgery” but “we were told their injuries were not fatal,” said Mme Wilson at a press conference.
Several cartridges of different calibers were found on site by investigators and some of the shots were fired from one or more moving vehicles.
Asked by a journalist about this modus operandi which evokes the methods of gangs, Vanessa Wilson replied that “the investigation is only in its early stages”. “We will study all the possibilities,” she added, calling on witnesses to the scene and residents to come forward to try to find the suspects.
“I need everyone to be outraged by what happened today,” she said, calling gun violence a “public health crisis”.
The state of Colorado, in the western United States, has seen some of the worst killings in American history.
In 1999, two teenagers killed 12 classmates and a teacher at their Columbine high school. And in 2012, a heavily armed man shot dead 12 people in a cinema in Aurora, during the screening of a film dedicated to Batman, The Dark Knight Rises.
Last March, an armed man killed 10 people in a supermarket in Boulder, 50 km from Denver, capital of Colorado.
Shooting causing many victims remains a recurring scourge in the United States, in schools, supermarkets and in the workplace in particular.
But blockages in Congress, under the influence of the arms lobby, make any major breakthrough on the subject unlikely despite calls from politicians, President Joe Biden included, to tighten control over their circulation.
According to statistics compiled by the newspaper Washington post, more than 256,000 students have been exposed to some form of gun violence since the Columbine massacre. This figure includes direct victims as well as witnesses and young people forced to evacuate their establishments in disaster due to gunfire.