Two juveniles and one adult were shot in Marvin Gaye Park in Northeast Washington this just after 9 a.m. on Wednesday, just blocks away from Woodson High School.
The school was sent into lockdown as officials tended to the victims’ non life-threatening injuries and put out a lookout for a school-aged suspect. Police Chief Peter Newsham said in a press conference police are looking for “a male in his teens wearing tan pants and a black covered top.” Police do not yet have a motive, and Newsham said that he’s not yet sure if video surveillance will be available.
Newsham said that the two minors who were shot are students at schools in MPD’s Sixth District, where the shooting occurred, but their schools were not in the immediate vicinity of where the shooting occurred.
“Whenever we have young people that are shot in the city it’s a very very serious concern to all of us. And the fact that these are school-age children, we’ll have to look into why they weren’t in school when school started,” Newsham said.
On Tuesday night, there was another double shooting on Division Avenue near the Prince George’s County line, Newsham said, in which two males were shot multiple times and one adult male victim died.
A Guns & America analysis of shootings in Washington found at least 84 school campuses had experienced one or more gunshots within 1,000 feet of their campus during the school day in the 2016-2017 school year.
There have been 116 murders in the District this year, a 14 percent increase over last year (which itself saw a 40 percent uptick in murders over 2017).
This story first appeared on WAMU.
Natalie Delgadillo