Gunfight rocks Dot community
Hail of bullets hits homes, cars
A hail of bullets sliced through a neighborhood in Dorchester Thursday night, police say, with dozens of shots blasting through living room walls, shattering windows, and punching holes in cars along two side streets that were transformed into a war zone.
Police say the melee on Wilbur Street and Upham Avenue was the result of two shooters frantically firing round after round at each other — about 33 shots in all — and although no one was injured, the gun battle shattered any sense of security of residents who already say bullet-riddled homes and cars are just a part of life.
“Me and my family, we are in danger. There is no safety anymore,” a resident of Upham Avenue told the Herald, declining to give his name, after counting eight bullet holes in the house he’s lived in for the last eight years.
“This should be a nice neighborhood — but no more,” he said.
Another resident — who like many others didn’t want to share her name in the wake of the shooting — said she was lying in bed when the bullets started flying.
“I heard the sound of popcorn or firecrackers,” she said. “I thought it was inside my house. I ran upstairs to my daughter. I asked her, ‘Are you OK? What happened? ... I looked outside and I saw police. I started to shake.”
Residents said they were told by investigators that 19 shots were fired from Wilbur Street and 14 others were fired back from Upham Avenue.
Police said they’re analyzing two 9 mm handguns that were pulled from a nearby dumpster and no arrests have been made.
After checking with her daughter, the woman said she walked into her living room, where she had been sitting just two hours before the shooting, to find a bullet had flown through the wood window casing, through a curtain near where she had been sitting and into the wall on the other side of the room.
“Suddenly it was inside my house,” the woman said, noting she found a bullet on the carpet.
Also hit was a BMW parked on Upham Avenue, which had its windows shattered. Another woman’s car was hit twice — one bullet cut into the car through a leather seat and out the other side.
Officers checking the homes hit by the bullets said “miraculously” no one was injured.
Police Commissioner William B. Evans said he is “grateful … there were no injuries and no innocent bystanders were hurt.”
“We should all be upset and angered that we have people out there that think it’s OK to start shooting at each other in our neighborhoods with absolute zero regard for human life,” Evans said in a statement.
The commissioner railed against the dangerousness of semi-automatic firearms, saying his officers “work tirelessly every day to get them off our streets.”
The woman who found the bullet in her living room said she was unable to go back to sleep.
“It’s crazy. I still don’t believe what happened,” she said. “They have to do something. I lived here for 20 years. It’s just getting worse and worse.”