2 dead in shooting at Florida club
FORT MYERS: A shooting outside a party at a Florida nightclub that left two male teenagers dead and as many as 18 other people wounded early on Monday was not an act of terror, police in Fort Myers said.
The latest burst of gun violence to wrack the state this summer occurred just after 12.30 am in the parking lot of Club Blu, which was hosting an event open to teenagers, the Fort Myers Police Department said in a statement.
Police said Stef’An Strawder, an 18-year-old basketball star at a local high school, and Sean Archilles, 14, were killed. Two other people have potentially life-threatening injuries, local hospital officials said.
Although police said they did not know the motive for the shooting, they confirmed in a statement that “this incident is not an act of terror (as it has been referred) or terrorism.”
Police said three people had been detained for questioning and that the area around the club was deemed safe, although roads in the vicinity remained closed.
Hospitals affiliated with the Lee Memorial Health System received 19 patients ranging in ages from 12 to 27 years from the nightclub shooting.
Four patients remain hospitalised at Lee Memorial Hospital. Two have potentially lifethreatening injuries and are in a surgical intensive care unit, Dr Drew Mikulaschek told reporters at a news conference.
The shooting came six weeks after a massacre at a nightclub in the Florida city of Orlando, where a lone gunman who sympathized with Islamist extremist groups killed 49 people in the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history.
Club Blu, located about 150 miles southwest of Orlando in the Gulf Coast city of Fort Myers, was hosting a “swimsuit glow party” for people all ages, according to a flyer posted on Twitter by local television station WINK.
The nightclub said on its Facebook page that the shooting occurred when the venue was closing and parents were picking up their children.