One person was killed and nine injured in a shooting just blocks from where thousands of people were on the streets for a New Year's Eve party in downtown Mobile, Alabama, police said.
Footage from local television channels showed police officers running and on horseback heading towards the area where the shooting took place around 45 minutes before midnight on Saturday.
Meanwhile, bystanders who heard the shots were desperate to take cover and hide.
“
It was terrifying
,” said Carly Bragg, who was downtown for the New Year's Eve celebration.
“It sounded like super close fireworks,” she said in an interview with Fox 10 News. Bragg said she and her friends hid inside a hallway that was “maybe 15 or 20 feet away from the sound.”
Several people were shot in downtown Mobile, Alabama.
WPMI/NBC News 15
The alert report for the shots was received by police at around 11:14 pm on downtown Dauphin Street.
Upon arrival, officers discovered that a 24-year-old man had been shot by a person, who was pronounced dead at the scene.
His identity had not been revealed until Saturday morning by the police.
No arrests have been reported either.
Nine other people suffered gunshot wounds during the shooting.
The victims, ranging in age from 17 to 57,
were transported to local hospitals with injuries ranging from non-life-threatening to severe, authorities told NBC News local WPMI 15 News.
In addition, two businesses were also hit by gunfire.
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The shooting occurred near the main stage of the Moon Pie Over Mobile festival, which was followed by fireworks.
Then a moon-shaped cake that fell from a downtown building at midnight to mark the beginning of 2023.
The alleged shooter and the person killed appeared to know each other, Mobile Police Chief Paul Prine told reporters near the scene.
“
It would give some comfort to all of us downtown that this is not a random shooting
,” Prine said.
Violence with firearms has marked the year 2022 with numbers that could make it one of the ones with the most shootings in the last ten years.
More than
39,900 people had died from firearms-related events
in the United States as of the end of November 2022, including more than 18,220 who died by homicide, murder or unintentional shooting, plus another 21,714 who died by suicide, according to Gun data. Violence Archive, the nation's most comprehensive gun violence tracker.
Of those victims, 291 were children between the ages of 0 and 11 and 1,225 were adolescents between the ages of 12 and 17.
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Calls to reform the country's gun laws have been repeated for decades, but were reignited after two mass shootings in May 2022: the attack that left 10 people dead at a store in a predominantly black neighborhood in Buffalo, New York, and the shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, which killed 21 people, including 19 children.
Last year, there were more than 610 mass shootings, which the Gun Violence Archive defines as those in which at least four people (not including the shooter) are killed or injured.
Congress passed a gun control bill in June that included provisions to strengthen background checks for gun buyers under 21, close the so-called boyfriend loophole (which had allowed people convicted of domestic abuse to possess a gun as long as they weren't married to the person they attacked), and investing money in red flag laws that allow courts to seize guns from people determined to be a danger to themselves or others.
