Suspect, 15, in custody after North Carolina shooting leaves five dead
Five people were killed by a shooter who opened fire along a walking trail in North Carolina’s capital city and eluded officers for hours before he was cornered in a home and arrested, police said.
A 15-year-old white male suspect is in custody and in critical condition, the Raleigh police commissioner, Estella Patterson, told a press conference on Friday.
Nicole Connors, 52, Susan Karnatz, 49, Mary Marshall, 35, and Gabriel Torres, 29, an off-duty police officer, was among the victims. An unnamed 16-year-old male was also killed during the shooting, confirmed Raleigh police.
The suspect was arrested around 9.37pm, authorities said. His identity has not been released.
Two people were also injured during the shooting, including Raleigh police officer Casey Clark who has been released. Marcille Garnder, 59,was also injured during the shooting and remains in critical condition.
The gunfire broke out around 5pm along the Neuse River Greenway in a residential area north-east of downtown, Raleigh’s mayor, Mary-Ann Baldwin, said. Officers from numerous law enforcement agencies swarmed the area, closing roads and warning residents to stay inside while they searched for the shooter.
Two people, including another police officer, were taken to hospitals. The officer was later released, but the other survivor remained in critical condition.
“Tonight, terror has reached our doorstep. The nightmare of every community has come to Raleigh. This is a senseless horrific and infuriating act of violence that has been committed,” Governor Roy Cooper told reporters.
Authorities did not offer any details on a motive, but Baldwin joined Cooper in decrying the violence.
“We must stop this mindless violence in America, we must address gun violence,” the mayor said. “We have much to do, and tonight we have much to mourn.”
Early on Friday, authorities searched a house a couple of streets over from where the shooting happened, WRAL-TV said.
The Raleigh shooting was the latest in a violent week across the country. Five people were killed on Sunday in a shooting at a home in Inman, South Carolina. On Wednesday night two police officers were fatally shot in Connecticut after apparently being drawn into an ambush by an emergency call about possible domestic violence. Police officers have been shot this week in Greenville, Mississippi; Decatur, Illinois; Philadelphia, Las Vegas and central Florida. Two of those officers, one in Greenville and one Las Vegas, were killed.
Thursday’s violence was the 25th mass killing in 2022 in which the victims were fatally shot, according to the Associated Press/USA Today/Northeas
tern University Mass Killings database. A mass killing is defined as when four or more people are killed excluding the perpetrator.
Brooke Medina, who lives in the neighborhood bordering the greenway, was driving home at around 5.15pm when she saw about two dozen police cars, both marked and unmarked, race toward the residential area about nine miles (14km) from Raleigh’s downtown. She then saw ambulances speeding the other direction, toward the closest hospital.
She and her husband, who was working from home with their four children, started contacting neighbors and realized there was a shelter-inplace order.
The family closed all of their window blinds, locked the doors and congregated in an upstairs hallway together, said Medina, who works as a communications vice-president at a thinktank. The family listened to the police scanner and watched local news before going back downstairs once the danger seemed to have moved further away from their home.
She described the neighborhood known as Hedingham as a sprawling, dense, tree-lined community that’s full of single-family homes, duplexes and townhomes that are more moderately priced compared with other parts of the Raleigh area.