BYSTANDER SHOT, TWO MEN NABBED IN MALL SHOOTOUT
Second shooting at South Shore Plaza in three years
Two men are in police custody after a shootout inside Braintree’s South Shore Plaza that left a teenage bystander wounded, the mall locked down and law enforcement from around the state swarming the area.
The men who were arrested are in their early 20s, and are suspected of exchanging fire after a fight at the busy mall. Police on Friday night didn’t identify the pair — or the 15-year-old girl who authorities say was taken to the hospital with non-lifethreatening wounds after being struck by a stray bullet.
Braintree Police Chief Mark Dubois said it appears that two groups of a total of around six or seven people got into a fight at the mall earlier in the day, and then went their separate ways. But they clashed again in the plaza shortly after 4:30 p.m., leading to one person on either side of the fight pulling a gun and opening fire. One of the bullets struck the girl, who was not affiliated with either group, Dubois said.
Everyone involved in the fight fled, and the two men who Dubois said police were caught “nearby” after believe were the shooters authorities called for a neigh
borhood to shelter in place. The chief said officers were still searching for the pair’s guns.
Police from around the area, including SWAT teams in heavy tactical gear from Boston, flooded the mall, which is one of the largest in the area. Law enforcement kept the building locked down for hours with shoppers sheltering in the stores as cops searched for the shooter.
Raziv Sapkota and Arun Oli sat outside and shook their heads at what they’d just witnessed inside the mall. The two men, who were doing some work on phones in the plaza, said they heard about five shots ring out, each sounding like the sharp crack of a tree branch breaking.
“All the people were just running and screaming,” Oli said.
Joshua Potsner, a manager at the Banana Republic in the mall, said he heard what “sounded like fireworks.”
But then he heard the yelling, and had everyone in the store stay in the back and shelter there.
His coworker Kathleen Omer recalled the shotsfired incident in the shoe department of the Macy’s that locked down the mall on a different Friday night three years ago. From an operations standpoint, this one went much more smoothly, she said after leaving the mall less than two hours after the shooting on Friday.
“They announced it over the loudspeaker — ‘this is not a drill,’ “she said.
Wes Ritchie, a Boston resident said he was shopping in Macy’s, said. “I heard someone say something like ‘someone is shooting.’ When you hear those words, I think you just turn around and run.”