An eight-year-old boy was killed on Friday in a shooting at an Alabama shopping mall that left three other people injured, police have said.
Hoover Police Chief Nick Derzis said the child was killed in the afternoon shooting at the Riverchase Galleria. The police chief said a girl and two adults were also hospitalised after the shooting. Authorities did not release the victims’ names.
Police did not give a motive for the shooting. Mr Derzis said police are working promising leads, but did not say if they had identified suspects.
“This is certainly a tragic situation when you have an innocent child who gets caught in the middle of an altercation between others,” Mr Derzis said.
Multiple shots were reported near the food court inside the mall, police said. “We don’t know at this point what led to the shooting or how many gunmen were involved,” police captain Gregg Rector said in an earlier news release.
Hoover mayor Frank Brocato said he visited the boy’s parents on Friday evening.
“This was just a very senseless tragedy and of course they are devastated by this,” Mr Brocato said. He asked residents in the city to pray for the family.
The mall was evacuated after the shooting.
Annalisa Pope, who works at Hollister in the mall, told WBMA-TV in a telephone interview that she heard six to seven shots fired.
“It wasn’t just one or two,” she said. “That’s what got me off guard. They [the shots] just kept going.”
She said the gunshots “sounded like they were coming from every direction”.
Hoover police asked anyone was in the mall who witnessed the shooting to call authorities.
“It felt so close,” Ms Pope said. “It was so surreal. It doesn’t even feel real right now. You wouldn’t expect something like that to happen out of nowhere on a normal, Friday afternoon.”
The mall in suburban Birmingham was the site of a 2018 police shooting where an officer fatally shot a black man with a gun after mistaking him for the gunman in an earlier shooting at the mall.
The shooting of 21-year-old Emantic “EJ” Bradford Jr prompted a series of protests at the mall. The Alabamaattorney general’s office cleared the officer, saying he acted “reasonably under the circumstances” in the encounter that spanned approximately five seconds.
Associated Press
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