Teen charged in connection with Baltimore block party shooting
Baltimore police said on Friday they had arrested a 17-year-old in connection with a 2 July mass shooting that killed two people and injured 28 at a neighborhood block party in the Maryland city.
The suspect, whom the Baltimore police pepartment did not name, “is being charged with possession of a firearm by a minor, assault weapon possession, reckless endangerment and handgun in vehicle”, the department said in a statement.
The shooting took place shortly after 12.30am on Sunday at a block party in the Brooklyn Homes residential area of south Baltimore. It was a tragedy in a long weekend Fourth of July national wave of gun violence, decried by Joe Biden and gun safety advocates. The Independence Day break is increasingly a time of greatest risk for mass shootings in the US, as rates tick up.
The long weekend of celebrations ended up marred by 16 mass shootings in which 15 people were killed and nearly 100 injured across the country.
The Gun Violence Archive, an authoritative database on gun violence in America, calculated the grim tally using its definition of a mass shooting as an incident in which four or more people excluding the shooter are killed or injured by firearms.
The tragic bloodletting was recorded from 5pm on Friday until 5am on Wednesday across 13 states as well as Washington DC. Texas and Maryland both entered the register twice.
In Baltimore on Friday, members of homicide and Swat teams arrested the 17-year-old around 7am after a search warrant was executed at a home, police said in a news release.
He was taken to a booking facility, where he was charged.
Police referred to the teen in the release as a person of interest. He is charged as an adult, but police aren’t identifying him since he is a minor, according to a department spokesperson, detective Freddie Talbert.