Residents of Stockton, California, are reeling after a deadly shooting at a toddler’s birthday party killed four people, including three children aged eight, nine and 14, and injured 11.
Authorities are still hoping to understand what happened at the celebration on Saturday, and urged witnesses to come forward.
Family members were preparing to cut the cake when the gunfire started inside a banquet hall packed with relatives and friends. “I actually thought it was my balloons popping. It was gunshots,” Patrice Williams, the birthday girl’s mother, told the Associated Press.
Her daughter, who turned two years old, was uninjured. But Williams said the girl’s sister, a cousin and three of her friends were shot.
“This is a time for our community to show that we will not put up with this type of behavior, when people will just walk in and kill children,” Withrow said. “And so if you know anything about this, you have to come forward and tell us what you know. If not, you just become complacent and think this is acceptable behavior.”
Since the shooting, streams of condolences and outrage poured on to social media from locals, who have grown tired of seeing violent losses of life, especially among the city’s youngest residents.
“When youth and loved ones go out to enjoy what our city has to offer, we should never have to track people down to make sure they’re alive. This should not be normal. This cannot remain normal,” Cymone Reyes, a Stockton native who runs Central Valley Gender Health and Wellness, a non-profit for the area’s LGBTQIA+ residents of color, said in a Facebook post on Sunday.
“Gun violence is preventable. We’ve seen years in Stockton where violence went down. We know reductions are possible. This city has done it before – which means we can do it again,” the post continued.
Sheriff’s spokesperson Heather Brent said earlier that investigators believe it was a “targeted incident”. Officials did not elaborate on why authorities believe it was intentional or who might have been targeted. She said investigators would welcome any information, “even rumors”. Detectives believe the gunfire continued outside and there may have been multiple shooters.
Roscoe Brown told AP the party was in honor of his brother’s granddaughter. Brown, who works for the city of Stockton’s office of violence prevention, was in Arizona when he learned about the shooting and drove straight to the scene. He said a niece and nephew of his were shot, and he knows several other victims. He did not have information about their conditions.
“Who would come and do that to some kids, you know?” Brown said. “You can’t shoot up a party. That’s senseless. A kid’s party, at that.”
Emmanuel Lopez told the Los Angeles Times that his brother, 21-year-old Susano Archuleta, was shot in the neck and died at the scene. Lopez said his nine-year-old daughter was shot in the head but survived. He did not share details about what led up to the shooting.
Stockton is a city of 320,000 residents and is about 80 miles (130km) east of San Francisco. With 54 homicides in 2024, the city’s homicide rate was significantly higher than the state average. As of October, there had been 34 homicides in 2025, according to city data.
Though gun violence has been a persistent issue for those who live in the city, in recent years, officials and local community advocates have worked to build up programs that can tamp down shootings and steer teens and young adults away from conflicts.
In 2014 – two years after the city marked a grim record high of 71 homicides – the city formed an office of violence prevention (OVP) to create bespoke strategies and services to reach the small portion of Stockton’s population who were responsible for most of the city’s violence.
In the decade since OVP’s creation, several other groups such as Crime Survivors for Safety and Justice and Advance Peace, a national violence intervention program, have expanded their work into the city.
Homicide rates have ebbed and flowed. While homicides slightly increased between 2016 and 2017, they decreased dramatically the following year, with 22 fewer homicides in the city for a total of 33 people killed, according to the city’s annual crime reports.
That improvement was short-lived as Stockton, like many cities throughout the US, saw surges in homicides in 2020 and 2021, with homicides leaping from 33 in 2019 to 56 in 2020 and remaining above previous lows ever since.
Hours after the shooting, the Stockton police department arrested five people, including a juvenile, on weapons and gang-related charges. There was no indication that the arrests were connected to the killings at the banquet hall, the sheriff said.
Mayor Christina Fugazi told reporters that the eight-year-old victim attended a local school and had a parent who worked for the Stockton unified school district. The mayor said counselors would be available this week at city schools.
She expressed anguish over the loss of victims so young.
“They should be writing their Christmas lists right now. Their parents should be out shopping for them for Christmas. And to think that their lives are over. I can’t even begin to imagine what these families are going through. Breaks my heart,” Fugazi said.
The Associated Press contributed reporting
