3- year- old, teen killed in separate Hartford shootings

HARTFORD — A 3- year- old boy was shot and killed in a drive- by shooting in the city’s north end Saturday afternoon, hours before a second shooting took the life of a 17- year- old in a bloody afternoon in the state’s capitol city.

Police say so far they do not believe the two incidents are connected. City leaders expressed grief and outrage at the violence during a press conference later that afternoon, and pleaded for witnesses to cooperate with investigators.

“Our whole city’s heart breaks for this child and for his family,” Mayor Luke Bronin said during a press conference that evening. “This is a crime that wounds a community, and we are grieving with the family of this little boy.”

Patrol officers were called to the 100 block of Nelson Street around 2: 25 p. m. after the city’s Shot Spotter system registered gunfire, a statment from police spokesman Lt. Aaron Boisvert said in a statement released earlier that afternoon.

“While officers were canvassing, an area hospital alerted dispatch that a 3- year- old victim had been transported with a gunshot wound,” Boisvert said.

The boy was originally listed in critical condition but later succumbed to his wounds, police said.

Police Chief Jason Thody later identified the 3- year- old victim as Rondell Jones, a city resident.

Thody said police cameras captured the incident. The footage shows a black Honda Accord pull up alongside another vehicle, where a passenger in the Honda fired “shots directly at the other vehicle,” Boisvert said.

The suspect vehicle then fled west on Nelson Street, acccording to police. Police have confirmed the shooter’s vehicle was later found unoccupied by the auto theft task force. It was stolen out of Windsor Locks.

A male who was inside the vehice struck by gunfire fled on foot. “He is believed to be the intended target,” Thody said. He said police have not yet located him “but efforts are underway to do so.”

Police have not said what relation, if any, the male believed to be the intended target had to the boy who was shot. Thody said the victim’s mother was inside the car at the time of the shooting, along with two other young children. He would not say who was driving at the time of the shooting.

Police did not say what the motive for the shooting might have been.

Bronin called the killing “unfathomable and sickening,” and the video made it “difficult to believe” the person who fired on the car did not know children were inside. He said authorities will pursue “the murder of this child with every resource we have.”

“No mother should have to bury her child,” said City Council President Maly Rosado. “To the person who did this know that the ... Hartford Police Department will find you, and you will be prosecuted to the extent,” she added.

City Council member Thomas Clarke pleaded with witnesses to “break the street code” and cooperate with investigators. As a father of two sons, he said “my heart aches and I cannot fathom the idea of one of my sons succumbing to a bullet.”

Thody said officers “are looking for any and all help” and asked anyone with information to reach out to the department’s tip line. Police believe there were multiple witnesses to the shooting.

Thody said pastors are working in the community with police to prevent the possibility of retaliation.

Hours later, police responded to a second shooting less than a mile away on Magnolia Street near Mather Street. Police said a 17- yearold male was shot and killed during that incident.

Police have not identifed the victim in that second shooting. A second person was also injured, but Thody said the second victim in the Magnolia Street shooting was “not a gunshot wound victim”

Authorities do not believe the two incidents are connected, Thody said, “but that doesn’t mean that we won’t develop something later.”

Police have confirmed rifle caliber shell- casings were found at the scene of the second shooting on Magnolia Street.

“These crimes tear families apart and they wound a whole community,” said Bronin. He asked the public to do everything they can not just to help police solve the shootings but to “end this senseless violence.”

The back- to- back shootings come as advocates for gun- violence prevention measures have pushed the Biden administration in recent weeks in the wake of two mass shootings.

Sen. Chris Murphy said in a tweet that the response from government to the shooting “cannot be nothing.”

The Democratic lawmaker blamed the shooting on the flow of illegal guns into “places like Hartford, which he said “is made possible by the holes in our background checks system.”