Birmingham officials plead for information on mass shooting, offer reward money
BIRMINGHAM, Ala. — Officials in Birmingham, Ala., pleaded Monday with members of the public for information leading to arrests in a weekend mass shooting that killed four people and injured more than a dozen others, announcing rewards of up to $100,000.
Police Chief Scott Thurmond said at a news conference that police are still sifting through tips. Five of the injured victims remain in the hospital, he said.
The FBI is offering a $50,000 reward, and Crime Stoppers is offering $50,000, officials said. Tipsters can remain anonymous, they said.
Authorities have still made no arrests after Saturday’s shooting killed four people and left 17 others injured in what police described as a targeted “hit” by multiple shooters who opened fire outside a popular nightspot in Birmingham’s Five Points South district.
“This mass shooting has a heavy toll of the community as a whole, but nothing more harmful than the emotional and physical pain of these actual victims,” Mayor Randall Woodfin said Monday. “But I want to make myself very clear on what the priority is: It is to hunt down, capture, arrest and convict the people who are responsible for this mass shooting.”
The shooting happened Saturday evening in Five Points South, a district filled with entertainment venues, restaurants and bars.
The shooting rocked an area of restaurants and bars that is often bustling on weekend nights. The mass shooting, one of several this year in the city, unnerved residents and left officials at home and beyond pleading for help to both solve the crime and address the broader problem of gun violence.
The shooting occurred on the sidewalk and street outside Hush Lounge, where blood stains were still visible on the sidewalk Sunday morning.
Thurmond has said authorities believe the shooting targeted one of the people who was killed, possibly in a murder-for-hire. A vehicle pulled up and “multiple shooters” got out and began firing, then fled, he said.
“We believe that there was a ‘hit,’ if you will, on that particular person,” Thurmond said earlier.
Police said about 100 shell casings were recovered. Thurmond said that law enforcement was working to determine what weapons were used, but that they believe some of the gunfire was “fully automatic.” Investigators also were trying to determine whether anyone fired back, creating crossfire.
Kylie Ossege was shot and temporarily paralyzed when an armed classmate attacked Oxford High School in Michigan in 2021.
In a statement late Sunday, police said the shooters are believed to have used “machine gun conversion devices” that make semiautomatic weapons fire more rapidly.
Officers found two men and a woman on a sidewalk with gunshot wounds, and they were pronounced dead there. An additional male gunshot victim was pronounced dead at a hospital, according to police.
Police identified the three victims found on the sidewalk as Anitra Holloman, 21, of the Birmingham suburb of Bessemer, Tahj Booker, 27, of Birmingham, and Carlos McCain, 27, of Birmingham. The fourth victim was pending identification.
The shooting was the nation’s 31st mass killing of 2024, of which 23 were shootings, according to James Alan Fox, a criminologist and professor at Northeastern University, who oversees a mass killings database maintained by the Associated Press and USA Today in partnership with the university.
Three of the nation’s 23 mass shootings this year were in Birmingham, including two earlier quadruple homicides.
Chandler writes for the Associated Press.
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