Police: 8 people, including girl, wounded in 2 DC shootings

WASHINGTON (AP) — Two shootings in Washington, D.C., on Friday night resulted in eight people, including a young girl, suffering injuries, the Metropolitan Police Department said.

There were no fatalities in the two shootings, which police said could be related because they occurred in the same area of the city in a short time frame.

About 10 p.m. police responded to reports of shots fired on Lebaum Street and found seven men who suffered gunshot wounds that were not life-threatening, Assistant Chief of Patrol Services South Andre Wright said in a news conference at the scene.

Most of the victims took themselves to hospitals, Wright said.

“There was some chaos, obviously, because of the number of victims and the loved ones,” he said.

While officers were on Lebaum Street, police received a report of a shooting on 2nd Street, where they found a 12-year-old girl who had suffered “a gunshot wound to her lower extremities,” Wright said, adding that the injury was not life-threatening.

Police were looking for a car described by witnesses on Lebaum Street as a black sedan, possibly a Mercedes, from which shooters “drove through the block and indiscriminately fired upon” people.

The two shootings were believed to be connected due to the proximity of the scenes and the close times of the shootings, Wright said, although a possible motive was not immediately known.

“It’s a beautiful night. There were folks who were hanging out here and there were folks who were moving about on the 2nd Street scene,” Wright said. “And for some reason you have some people who think that it was okay to fire a firearm at multiple individuals at two different scenes. And we’re not going to let that stand.”