Video catches moment gunman fires into New Orleans parade
Three people remained in critical condition Monday morning after a shooting at a New Orleans Mother’s Day parade wounded 19. Police said they were seeking three suspects in the case.
The injured were part of a “second line” parade, a New Orleans tradition involving community members marching behind a first-line group of marchers, such as a band. Such parades have been occasionally been touched by violence over the years.
But the brazen shooting at the Mother’s Day march in the city’s eastern 7th Ward marked one of the most dramatic strokes of violence to strike New Orleans in recent memory, with a 10-year-old girl and a 10-year-old boy grazed by bullets and many participants hit by ricochets.
No one was killed in the attack, authorities said.
New video released by the New Orleans Police Department appears to capture the moment when a gunman in a white T-shirt, waiting by a house as the procession goes by, runs up to the crowd and begins to open fire at close range.
The crowd instantly scatters and flees from the suspect, who keeps his gun elevated as people run away, some falling to the street. The gunman then runs away. It’s not clear if he was targeting a particular person.
An amateur video that recorded a fragment of the shooting appeared to capture the sound of two guns firing, which police confirmed Sunday. It’s not clear if the newly released video shows a second gunman.
No arrests had been announced as of Monday morning.
Police said a “full contingent” of officers had been accompanying the second line as it proceeded through the 7th Ward, and three men seen running away from the shooting were identified as suspects.
Mayor Mitch Landrieu said Sunday evening that there was no indication that the shooter or shooters were participating in the community’s march.
“These kinds of incidents are not going to go unanswered. We’re going to be very, very aggressive. There were hundreds of people out there today. Somebody knows who did this,” Landrieu told reporters. “We have mothers that were shot, sisters that were shot, little children that were shot.”
Two witnesses told the Los Angeles Times on Sunday that the second-line march had veered off its planned route shortly before the shooting.
LSU Public Hospital spokesman Marvin McGraw told The Times on Monday morning that the hospital received 11 of the victims and that four remained hospitalized, including the three victims listed in critical condition.
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