Rash of child killings frustrates leaders in St. Louis

ST. LOUIS — The gunfire that has long haunted St. Louis streets has taken an even more disturbing turn, with a rash of shootings involving children that has left the city’s police chief angered and frustrated by the lack of cooperation of witnesses.

Four children died from gunfire over the past week and two others were injured. Those killed included girls ages 3 and 11, along with a 16-year-old boy and a 16-yearold girl. The injured were girls ages 5 and 6. All six victims were black.

Police Chief John Hayden told The Associated Press on Friday that it appears that some of the children were hit by gunfire intended for adults who were near the kids.

“What we’re learning in our investigations is that there have been previous confrontations and other things that led to the incidents where the children are injured,” Hayden said.

Making matters worse, the chief said, was the lack of cooperation from the targeted adults. No arrests have been made in any of the recent shootings.

“The common denominator, the thing that frustrates me the most, is the fact that the adults and others of age are less than fully cooperative with our investigators,” Hayden said.

FBI statistics released in September showed St. Louis had a murder rate of 66.1 per 100,000 people in 2017, the worst rate in the nation. Hayden said about half the shootings — fatal and non-fatal — in St. Louis are drug-related and another 35 percent “are based on personal vendettas and disputes.”

The city has seen 80 confirmed homicides so far this year, up slightly from the same time a year ago. Only 23 of the crimes have been solved, in part due to lack of cooperation from victims. All but eight of the 80 victims were black in a city that is nearly equally split between blacks and whites.

The shootings involving children in St. Louis appear to be part of a national trend in recent years. A study in December in the New England Journal of Medicine found that death by gunshot was the second-highest cause of death in the U.S. in 2016 among people ages 1-19. The study looked at death certificates from 57 jurisdictions and found a 28 percent increase in the rate of firearm deaths from 2013.

Police statistics show that four homicide victims in St. Louis this year were age 16 or younger, equaling the number of child victims in 2018, when there were 187 total killings.