Multiple people were killed and dozens more were injured in separate shootings across the United States Friday night and early Saturday, just days after President Joe Biden met with a group of law enforcement officials, community groups and state and local leaders to address a nationwide surge in violent crime.
The incidents in Houston, Philadelphia, Portland, Oregon, Sacramento, California, and Washington, D.C., come amid a yearlong rise in nationwide gun violence and record firearm sales.
Authorities investigating three of the attacks indicated multiple weapons or shooters were involved.
Biden on Monday addressed the surge in violent crime by encouraging communities to use $350 billion in state funding included in the Covid-19 relief plan to hire officers and pay for crime prevention.
"We recognize that we have to come together to fulfill the first responsibility of a democracy and to keep each other safe," he said.
In Washington, D.C., a 6-year-old girl was killed in an attack late Friday that also injured three men and two women, police said.
"There's too much gun violence still perpetuated in this city, and too many children are being harmed," Ashan Benedict, the Metropolitan Police Department's executive assistant chief, said from the crime scene overnight.
Two men were killed and four victims were hospitalized with non-life-threatening injuries in Friday night violence in the Old Sacramento tourist district in Sacramento, California, according to officials.
"It is believed that there was some type of altercation between two groups prior to the shooting and multiple firearms have been recovered at the scene," the Sacramento Police Department said in a statement.
In Portland, Oregon, a woman was killed and six others had non-life-threatening injuries in a Saturday morning shooting downtown, according to police. It is possible the number of victims could rise as investigators check hospitals for those who might have arrived by private transportation, officials said.
Shortly before 2 a.m. Saturday in Philadelphia, gunfire left a 27-year-old man dead in the city's East Falls neighborhood, according to NBC Philadelphia.
The shooting was one of multiple incidents in the city from Friday night into Saturday morning, the news station reported.
There was an altercation between two men in the city’s Queen Village neighborhood that left one dead, and police said authorities received reports of six additional shooting victims, including a 16-year-old boy who was shot in the abdomen and listed in critical condition at a hospital.
Houston's Galleria was the site of a Friday night attack that injured a man who was struck in a leg, authorities said. The suspected shooter fled to a parking garage, where an off-duty officer engaged in a shootout with the man, according to Houston Police Chief Troy Finner.
The officer, a 5-year department employee, was not injured, the chief said. It wasn't clear if the suspected shooter, who fled, was struck. He was still at-large, Finner said.
"It's a sign of the time," the chief said. "We just have to, as a city, focus in on these violence criminals—knuckleheads. We have families in the mall. it makes no sense."
