Allegheny County District Attorney Stephen Zappala said one of the shooters used a handgun to steer the victims toward the house’s porch, where a second gunman picked them off with an AK-47 style rifle. “I’ve been the DA for 18 years; I haven’t seen something like this”.
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A county official is urging witnesses to come forward in a shooting at a backyard party that left five people dead and three wounded in suburban Pittsburgh. Three other people are hospitalized; two of them are in critical condition.
The dead have been identified as Jerry Shelton, 25, his sisters, Chanetta Powell, 35, and Brittany Powell 27, who was pregnant, as well as Tina Shelton, 37, and Shada Mahone, 26.
A prosecutor says the gunmen appeared to have targeted one or two of the victims.
One of the women killed was pregnant, police Superintendent Charles Moffatt later said at a news conference.
Police are considering drugs as a possible motive, however “everything is on the table”, Moffatt said.
Carl Morris and his son, Robert, were getting ready to leave their house across the street when they heard a volley of three shots, a pause, then gunfire lasting more than a minute.
The massacre in Wilkinsburg, a borough of about 15,000 mostly lower and middle-income residents, is the latest in a series of mass shootings that have made gun control a matter of heated debate in the United States. When she went outside, she said, she saw people screaming near the house.
Although Wilkinsburg has a reputation for violence, Jones said it has been rare in his neighborhood, which is about a block off a major street about a half-mile from Interstate 376, the major commuter artery through Pittsburgh’s eastern suburbs.
In video from CNN affiliate WPXI-TV of the shooting aftermath, a woman approached the house and cried out, “I’ve lost my baby”.
“This is not a part of the neighborhood where shootings happen”, he said.
“As a community, we must say enough is enough”, he said.
“We must find better ways to stop gun violence and to keep guns out of the hands of criminals”.
“People’s lives taken like that, just on the drop of a hat”, she told KDKA.
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“And it needs to stop”.
