Balloons hang from a pole near a makeshift memorial on the front porch of a house, Friday, March 11, 2016 in Wilkinsburg, Pa. A shooting at a backyard party of the house killed and wounded multiple people on Wednesday night in the suburb east of Pittsburgh.
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Zappala said the motive was not known, but authorities were exploring whether it was related to drugs.
Four people – three women and one man – died at the scene and the fifth, another woman, died later at the hospital.
Of the three people wounded, two men are in critical condition while a woman is in stable condition.
Police said shots were fired from an alley, and that when partygoers tried to seek cover in the home, someone on the side or backyard next to the residence opened fired at the back porch, where all four deaths at the scene occurred.
Police said they have no suspects. He said gunshots came from two locations but police don’t believe anyone at the party fired back.
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.
Vehicles from the medical examiner’s office arrived in the neighborhood early Thursday to remove the victims’ bodies. So did their cousins, Tina Shelton and Shada Mahone. “There are some we are more interested in than others”, Allegheny County Police Superintendent Charles Moffatt said at a news conference, noting that the suspects had fled on foot.
Two of Jessica Shelton’s daughters, one eight months’ pregnant, and one of her sons were killed.
Neighbors said they heard between 30 and 40 shots, local KDKA television reported. Allegheny County Executive Rich Fitzgerald urged witnesses to step forward, saying that “can be our first step to stopping the violence in our communities”.
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There was no return fire, police Lt. Andrew Schurman told AFP. “We haven’t seen something like this for quite some time, if we’ve ever seen this type of planning in terms of taking life”, Zappala said. Police said they found one pile of shell casings just outside the yard in an alley.
