1 teen killed and 6 others injured in shooting at a Halloween party in Kansas City, Kansas, police say
By Jason Hanna, Aya Elamroussi and Rebekah Riess, CNN
An uninvited group opened fire on a Halloween house party after being asked to leave Monday night in Kansas City, Kansas, killing a 17-year-old and injuring six other teens, police said.
One person is in custody, though police are not calling the person a suspect, and police have recovered a vehicle that investigators think was driven by the suspects, the department said in a release Tuesday.
About 70 to 100 teenagers were at the costume party when some uninvited people arrived and were asked to leave, Kansas City Police Chief Karl Oakman said Tuesday. As those people left, more than one of them — perhaps four to six — “shot up the house,” Oakman said.
The shooters, wearing costumes and masks, are believed to have left in a dark SUV, according to Oakman.
The gunfire was yet another example of how gun violence so often interrupts American life in places traditionally seen as safe, from schools to stores to hospitals and even funerals. Also Monday night, at least 14 people were shot in a drive-by shooting in Chicago at busy corner where people had gathered for a vigil, police said.
In Kansas City, the police chief voiced his frustration with the violence, calling the shooting disturbing and unacceptable.
“This stuff in the community has to stop. There are far too many guns out here. This was a party with high school-aged students,” Oakman said in an initial news conference Monday night. “Everyone has guns now. We need to be smarter than this.”
That shooting was reported just after 9 p.m. Someone had noticed that an uninvited group arrived and was “much older than the other kids at the party,” Oakman said Tuesday.
The group exited, but “once they got outside … they shot up the house,” Oakman said. The shooters appeared to fire randomly, he said.
The victims’ names weren’t released. An 18-year-old victim was in stable condition at a hospital, and the five others — ages 15-16 — suffered non-life-threatening injuries, Oakman said Tuesday.
Some of the shooting victims were inside, and some were outside, the chief said.
Information about the party had been posted on social media, and it was “invite-only,” Oakman said. A parent was home at the time, he said.
It was likely that “someone knew (the assailants) and told them about the party,” the chief said Tuesday. “So, we need those individuals to call us and give us information.”
More than 500 mass shootings have happened in the United States so far this year, according to the non-profit Gun Violence Archive. The count was at 574 as of Tuesday, an average of more than 1.8 mass shootings every day, says the group, which like CNN defines a mass shooting as one in which at least four people are shot, excluding the shooter.
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CNN’s Shawn Nottingham and Andy Rose contributed to this report.
