Two people were killed and six others were wounded in a mass shooting at a music festival afterparty in downtown Los Angeles early on Monday, officials said.
Police first responded around 11pm on Sunday evening to shut down a “big party” after officers saw a person possibly armed with a gun go inside a building in the city’s warehouse district, Los Angeles police department spokesperson Norma Eisenman told the Associated Press. That person was arrested at the scene, she said.
The event was billed on social media as an unofficial afterparty for Hard Summer, a weekend festival for house and techno music that took place in Hollywood Park by SoFi stadium, which is located in Inglewood in south LA, the Los Angeles Times reported.
LAPD received reports of shots fired at the afterparty around 1am on Sunday, after officers had cleared the area. When police returned, they found one person had died and learned multiple people had been hit by bullets, Eisenman said.
One man died at the scene and a woman died at a hospital, the spokesperson said. Six people were taken to hospitals in unknown condition, she said.
A man told KABC-TV that his 29-year-old son was one of the two people killed.
There was no information about a suspect or a motive. Investigators remained at the scene for hours.
Karen Bass, the mayor of Los Angeles, condemned the shooting in a social media post, saying: “This senseless violence and loss of life is devastating and those who are responsible must be held accountable. There will be no tolerance for violence in this city. My thoughts are with the victims and their families.”
Bass said the investigation was ongoing and gang interventionists were “providing support for families and continuing the everyday work of keeping our neighborhoods safe”. Interventionists function as social workers and mediators who work within communities to resolve conflict and prevent violence.
One attendee at the party, who declined to give their name, told the LA Times that it sounded as if “100 shots” had been fired, and said people scrambled onto the street in a stampede.
The LA violence happened two days after four people were killed in a shooting at a bar in Montana, which was the ninth mass shooting of the year so far, according to the Gun Violence Archive, a non-partisan group. A gunman also killed four people in Manhattan in an incident that shook New York city last month, and multiple shootings broke out across the country on the Fourth of July holiday.
