A shooting in downtown Denver left one person dead and four others injured Monday afternoon with police scrambling to locate a suspect who is still at large.
Police responded to reports of multiple gunshots at 21st Street and Lawrence Street in Denver’s bustling downtown LoDo neighborhood around 4:00 p.m. on Monday, a department official said at a press conference. The shooting occurred just a few blocks from Coors Field baseball stadium, home of the Colorado Rockies.
“It’s too early in the investigation to be able to say exactly what happened here and why,” Denver Police spokesperson Doug Schepman told reporters Monday evening. He added that investigators were collecting witness statements and seeking any video or photo evidence in order to help identify a suspect or suspects.
Here’s what we know so far:
Four victims injured
One victim was pronounced dead at the scene, according to Denver Police, while four others were transported to area hospitals with injuries.
Schepman initially reported that they were in critical conditions, but Denver Police later said that the injuries are “believed to be non-life threatening.”
Update #2: There are 5 confirmed victims related to the 21st St/Lawrence St shooting. 1 victim is deceased & 4 victims were transported to the hospital — all in stable condition. The circumstances surrounding the shooting remain under investigation. https://t.co/jslSRdziOy
— Denver Police Dept. (@DenverPolice) November 20, 2018
None of the victims have been identified
Suspect at large
The shooter is not in police custody and is still at large, Denver Police spokesperson Doug Schepman said. Schepman said police could not confirm the number of gunshots fired or whether there was more than one shooter involved in the incident. No other details, including the shooter’s possible motive, are known at this time.
“It’s too early to be able to say that the motive is here or what happened until we’ve been able to gather all the available information,” Schepman said. “Downtown is obviously a very populated area, so to have multiple gunshots fired in an area like this is quite concerning.”
The shooter fired a handgun about half a dozen times at a group of homeless people before getting into a car and leaving the area, witness Hisam Derani told the Denver Post. A bystander returned fire at the car as the shooter sped away, Derani said.
There was another homicide on Sunday a few blocks away from the scene of Monday’s shooting, but police said there was no reason to believe the incidents were related.
Colorado’s seventh mass shooting of the year
The incident in Denver Monday was the 315th mass shooting event so far this year, according to the Gun Violence Archive (GVA), a nonpartisan research group. Another shooting in Philadelphia on Monday, which killed four people, brings the organization’s tally to 316 total mass shootings so far in 2018. Those incidents resulted in 352 deaths and 1,257 injuries.
The GVA’s records put 2018’s toll of violence about on pace with last year’s: the group recorded 325 mass shootings over the same period in 2017.
The Denver shooting was Colorado’s seventh so far this year, according to the archive. Six of those shootings occurred in Denver, while the seventh was in Colorado Springs, where a sheriff’s deputy was killed and three other offices wounded in an incident in February.
Slightly different figures were listed by the Mass Shooting Tracker, which defines a mass shooting as one in which four or more people are shot. The tracker has recorded 391 shootings so far in 2018.