PHILADELPHIA _ Philadelphia's surge in gun violence continued over the weekend, with at least 25 people shot on Saturday and Sunday, including two 11-year-old boys wounded in separate incidents, police said.
One of the 11-year-old boys was wounded in a triple shooting Sunday night in Grays Ferry. The other was shot near a playground Saturday night in Olney. Both suffered graze wounds and were in stable condition, according to police.
The bloodshed also included gunfire at a playground that injured six people, a shooting in East Mount Airy that killed a 25-year-old man, another man shot overnight Sunday after leaving an Airbnb in Center City, and an incident in which two bullets struck the door of an officer's patrol car, police said.
The weekend spike was the latest in a series of exceptionally violent outbursts during the city's most violent year in more than a decade, and it came just days before City Council plans emergency hearings seeking answers about how and why shootings keep increasing.
Through Sunday, police statistics show, at least 1,139 people have been shot in Philadelphia this year _ a 36% increase over the same span last year and at an annual pace higher than any since at least 2007. Only five days this year have passed without a single shooting in the city, and on at least 80 days, five or more people were shot.
The victims have included at least 102 children, according to an Inquirer analysis, a tally that will soon surpass the number of kids shot in the city in all of last year.
The weekend's outbreak was another short-term stretch in which dozens of people have been shot this summer. On May 31 and June 1, at least 35 people were wounded by gunfire, and 23 people were shot on July 5, the most in a single day since at least 2013.
But the violence has not been limited to hourslong outbursts. More than 200 people were shot in June and 215 were shot in July, according to city statistics. The next-highest monthly tally over the past five years was in August 2015, when 162 people were shot.
The rise in shootings has contributed to a spike in homicides, unsurprising in a city where murders are overwhelmingly committed with guns. Police say 259 people have been killed in the city this year, a 31% increase over the same date last year and the highest pace since the mid-1990s, when the city regularly recorded more than 400 homicides per year.
Police reported an arrest in only one of the weekend's cases: the shooting of the officer's car. They did not identify the man taken into custody, but said he injured another officer who tried to arrest him as he was riding away on an ATV.
City Councilmember Kenyatta Johnson has scheduled emergency hearings for Tuesday and Wednesday to discuss the rise in shootings and possible efforts to combat it. Testimony is expected from leaders within the police department and district attorney's office.
The weekend's violence occurred in neighborhoods across the city, and was most intense Sunday, when at least 14 people were shot in 11 incidents, police said.
One of them was the triple shooting that wounded one of the 11-year-old boys, police said. Gunfire erupted on the 1500 block of S. Napa Street in Grays Ferry around 7:48 p.m. A 31-year-old man and a 44-year-old woman were also injured; police said they were hospitalized in stable condition.
About an hour earlier, in East Mount Airy, 25-year-old Shaquan Gleaves was fatally shot on the 100 block of East Sharpnack Street. Police said Monday they believe two men fired at him from a moving car. No arrests had been announced.
Around 4:41 a.m. Sunday, a 33-year-old man told police he was shot in the shin after walking away from an Airbnb on the 1000 block of Arch Street in Center City. The man told officers he then walked to a bus stop on the 1000 block of Market Street to call 911. He was hospitalized in stable condition, police said.
Saturday night, just before 10 p.m., an 11-year-old boy suffered a graze wound from a bullet near a playground in Olney, police said.
And about a half-hour before that, six people were shot _ three women, ages 59, 18 and 24, and three men, ages 17, 18 and 18 _ in a playground near the Philadelphia Zoo. All were hospitalized in stable condition, police said.
Police did not report a motive or any arrests. Commissioner Danielle Outlaw called the incident "senseless" and said: "These acts of lawlessness have no place in our communities."
The violence continued Monday afternoon, when a 29-year-old man was shot in the chest in Kingsessing on the 1100 block of South Peach Street. Police said he was taken to Penn Presbyterian Hospital in critical condition.
