Deadly Weekend in the City
It seems like every Monday, we have to recap the weekend's shootings as they've been averaging about one or two a weekend. This weekend, there was two on Sunday, both in broad daylight, and two more early this morning.
The first one occured about 10:15 on Sunday morning (again with the morning shootings) when the victim, Anthony Hunter Jr., was just cleaning out his van when two men approached on foot and fired away. Hunter got about half a block before dropping and the suspects ran the other way. According to Ross Mirkarimi, there was about twenty-five shell casings at the scene of the crime. This all happened around Eddy Street at Yerba Buena Plaza East. Hunter did not survive.
Two hours later, at Ammel Park townhomes on Grove Street, about five blocks away from the other shooting, a Honda Civic with three people inside pulled alongside a thirteen year old girl and her friends and after a brief discussion, a man stepped out of the car and fired away, injuring the girl. Police think the shootings might be related. Both shootings occurred near two other shootings that have taken place this year.
This morning, a man was shot on at Haight and Fillmore, which is kind of scary in that SFist has spent a lot of time at that corner, at about 2 in the morning. Fifteen minutes later, another man was shot in a car at Grove and Baker streets. He was still able to drive off to Haight and Fillmore, where cops were still investigating the previous shooting (!), and crashed into a bus shelter. He was later transported to the hospital where he died of injuries.
There was also a shooting in Fremont, injuring five and killing two.
After the jump, we have an e-mail from a SFist reader who was an eyewitness to the shooting of the thirteen year old girl.
Image from ABC 7 news web site.
i know, i know. another one and like you guys said, are they even news anymore? but when it's right in front of you, i'm gonna say,"yeah, it is."
and it's true - they don't care what time of day it is. it happenedat 12:30 in the afternoon on a Sunday. on grove, right at laguna. just 2 short blocks from the main strip of shops.
a girl was shot, believed to be a teenager. i heard about 5-6 rapid gunshots and looked out my window and saw a kid fleeing the scene. when i was giving the officer my statement, she told me it was the second shooting so far this afternoon, the other one being close by. i hear gunshots in this neighborhood almost every night, and the thing is-- i don't feel any less safe. maybe it's because i lived in nyc for a decade or maybe it's just me, but safe or not, it's something that needs to change.
i spoke to a woman on the corner who grew up here during the 80s crack epidemic and is now studying criminal justice. she told me about how the neighborhood was before crack and how it changed and all the funerals she had been to for her friends' kids. she said it basically all comes down to turf wars. the kid i saw fleeing the scene appeared and the cop came and told me she thought he might have been with the girl and ran for help, but the woman who grew up there told me about how a lot of the time the shooters flee and then come back to the scene when the crowd appears so they are there with everyone else and don't seem suspicious. they do it so they can make sure the person is really dead so they don't have to come back later and finish the job. it's all just really fucked up.