PAIR OF GUNMEN AMBUSH PARTY, KILLING FIVE
UNITED STATES
WILKINSBURG, PA. Two gunmen working as a team fatally shot five people and critically wounded two others at a backyard cookout in Pennsylvania, with one attacker using a high- velocity rifle to shoot all the victims in the head as they were driven in his direction, a prosecutor said Thursday.
“The murders were planned. They were calculated, brutal,” district attorney Stephen Zappala said.
The gunmen appeared to have targeted one or two of the victims, Zappala said. He said drugs hadn’t been ruled out as a motive.
Four women, one of them pregnant, and a man were killed as they rushed toward the back porch and an alleyway to seek cover as a gunman fired a .40-calibre pistol at as many as 15 adults who were playing cards and having a latenight cookout in the yard Wednesday.
That steered the victims toward the rear porch and door of the house, where an accomplice armed with a 7.62- mm rifle similar to an AK-47 shot them from behind a chain-link fence, Zappala said.
The dead included three siblings: Brittany Powell, 27, who lived at the home; Jerry Shelton, 35; and Chanetta Powell, 25. The other two were Shada Mahone, 26, and Tina Shelton, 37.