FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. — One thing was clear from the frazzled 911 calls — among the victims of gun violence were children.
Dispatchers struggled to get details from several callers seeking help at the Broward Gardens apartment complex in Fort Lauderdale shortly before 9 p.m. Wednesday. They were emphatic about needing ambulances, repeatedly shouting that they didn’t know exactly what happened, only that multiple children were shot in their arms or legs.
Fort Lauderdale Police have confirmed that five people, including two minors, were wounded in the spray of bullets at the complex in the 2900 block of Northwest 19th Street. Detectives on Thursday were still trying to find out what led to the shooting, and few details have been released.
Chief Patrick Lynn told reporters Wednesday night that one group was in the apartment’s courtyard when a second group approached and the shooting began.
One of the adults has life-threatening injuries, Casey Liening, a spokesperson for Fort Lauderdale Police, said in an email later Wednesday night. The rest suffered “various injuries that appear to be non-life-threatening at this time.”
Police have not released any information about suspects or announced any arrests.
It smelled like rain Thursday afternoon, heat and gray clouds blanketing the complex. A few children rode skateboards on the concrete second floor of one of the buildings. A few other residents walked around, others sat on foldout lawn chairs outside their doors. Thunder cracked before the rain rolled in.
An armed security guard, crime scene tape stuffed into a trash can near the playground, a fist-sized bullet hole cracked in one apartment’s window and Police Department flyers with information about how to find support after a traumatic event signaled what happened the night before.
The residents who spoke to the South Florida Sun Sentinel declined to provide their names. A 42-year-old woman who spoke to the Sun Sentinel said she has lived in the complex for 20 years.
She called 911, her anger at the reality of children being shot evident.
“This is sick, man. These kids are sick, man,” she told a 911 dispatcher Wednesday night, according to the calls released by the Police Department. “These kids are so stupid. They don’t see that they ain’t doing nothing but killing each other ... An innocent child could get shot ... We failed these kids.”
She remained angry and upset Thursday afternoon, the bullet hole in her window marked off with a police evidence marker. Another bullet pierced the top of her front door.
Several of the 911 callers said children were outside setting off fireworks when they were shot. The woman told the Sun Sentinel the bullet hitting her window sounded like rocks thrown at the glass.
Moments before the shooting began, her daughter went outside to throw away the trash. The bullets flew when she was still outside, and she took cover behind cars parked in the nearby parking lot.
The woman said she looked outside and saw someone wearing a red camouflage jacket running and shooting. Her daughter came running inside from another direction.
The woman’s 1-year-old granddaughter was asleep in the apartment, and she is thankful she didn’t wake up to the sound of bullets. Her young son wasn’t home. She was thankful for that, too, because he typically plays in the living room, she said, the room behind the window that was partially broken.
Law enforcement officers were out in the complex until the early morning hours, she said. She said she counted at least 40 rounds on the ground identified by evidence markers.
She and another man whose relative lives in the complex said there have been multiple shootings there in the last year.
One resident told the Sun Sentinel his two nephews were the children who were shot, ages 14 and 11 or 10 years old. Residents who called 911 said one victim was 14 or 15 years old. Police have not released the ages of the two minors and three adults.
It remains unclear whether both groups of people were shooting at each other, but one woman who called 911 said the minors who were shot did not have guns.
Children and teenagers are dying from guns and being shot at “staggeringly high rates,” according to Everytown for Gun Safety, a nonprofit based in New York that advocates for gun control. Their research on the effects of gun violence on children and teens says guns are their leading cause of death.
A total of 15,000 children and teenagers are shot and wounded across the country each year, the equivalent of 53 children and teenagers every day on average, their research says.
Since January, the nonprofit’s gun violence archive data says at least 20 children have been shot to death in Florida and another 34 injured.
The Hollywood Broadwalk shooting, where nine were injured on Memorial Day, is included in the organization’s data. Hollywood Police identified and arrested three people as the shooters. Two of them are minors.
Four of the nine who were injured in that shooting were minors, ranging in age from 1 to 17 years old. The majority of the victims were innocent bystanders.
Being exposed to gun violence has a myriad of impacts on minors, according to the nonprofit’s research — they play less outside, feeling their neighborhoods aren’t safe, and their school performance is affected.
“Gun violence shapes the lives of the children who witness it, know someone who was shot, or live in fear of the next shooting,” says one of their key research findings on gun violence impacts.
Police stuck flyers in residents’ doors, offering resources for support and acknowledging their everyday lives may be disrupted by the “aftershock” of the traumatic event.
“Sometimes a particular incident is so emotionally painful, a person cannot cope with experiences on their own,” it said, providing the 211 number to reach a 24-hour crisis hot line and a list of mental health services and counseling centers.
The Police Department said in an email that Chief Lynn and Investigations Bureau Chief Luis Alvarez talked to residents Thursday, and the department is using all its resources to find out what led up to the shooting and to identify the suspects. More officers will be in the area.
Police ask anyone with information about the shooting to contact Detective Sean Reddish (954) 828-5676, Detective Tiffany Williams at (954) 828-6617 or anonymously contact Broward County Crimestoppers at (954) 495-TIPS.
———
