20 shootings reported over weekend in Detroit
August 26, 2013 at 12:33 pm
20 shootings reported over weekend in Detroit
- George Hunter
- The Detroit News
Detroit — Police flooded the city’s neighborhoods during the weekend with dozens of “strike force” officers in an effort to get guns off the streets, but the violence continued with 20 shootings, two carjackings and a sexual assault.
The incidents from 6 a.m. Friday to 6 a.m. Monday included a one-year-old girl who was wounded in a drive-by shooting, and a murder that ended when a body lay in the street for several hours, riling up about 200 residents and forcing officers from across the city to quell the unruly crowd.
Between 7 p.m. and 3 a.m. Friday and Saturday, “strike force” officers from various commands including the Fugitive Apprehension Team and Narcotics Division were deployed on overtime. They wrote 585 tickets, impounded 20 cars, made 20 felony arrests and 14 misdemeanor arrests, according to Detroit Police reports.
There were 9 handguns were seized in the effort — 8 by Eastern District Special Operations officers. Only one gun was confiscated during the weekend by strike force officers on the city’s west side.
Friday’s bloodshed started at 4:20 p.m. in the 8120 block of Durand, on the city’s east side near Van Dyke and Kerchival, when a one-year-old girl was wounded in a drive-by shooting.
“The witness stated she was standing in front of her home with several other people when a burgundy Buick ... drove around the block several times,” said a police report of the incident.
Several shots were fired into the crowd from someone in the Buick’s passenger’s seat, and a one-year-old girl received glass and bullet fragments to the left hand, according to the police report. She was listed in temporary serious condition.
A 15-year-old boy was also shot in broad daylight Friday on Wagner and Lumley on the southwest side. He told police the shots came from a dark-green vehicle at about 10:50 a.m. His wounds were not critical.
There were two carjackings during the weekend — the first at Westwood and W. Warren at 10:25 p.m. Friday; and another about 4 hours later at 8 Mile and Hoover.
Four people were shot Friday, and six Saturday — then, for the second week in a row, the city saw an unusually bloody Sunday, with 10 shootings, two of them fatal.
At 6:10 p.m., a 21-year-old man was fatally shot in the 11200 block of Craft.
Police sources say it took several hours for Wayne County Medical Examiners to pick up the body, which lay in the street.
“That incensed the crowd,” a police supervisor who was at the scene told The News. “Something like that is entertainment for a lot of people; you could probably sell beer and popcorn.”
The officer described a chaotic scene: “The street lights were out, and it was dark” he said. “The body was laying in the street covered by a blanket for hours. There were 200 people out there getting crazy. We put crime scene tape up, but they crossed the tape. We got on a bullhorn to tell them to disperse; they didn’t comply.
“Finally, we had to call the (Special Response Team) and officers from across the city to keep the crowd away from the crime scene so homicide could investigate,” the officer said.
It reportedly took between 4 and 6 hours before the morgue picked up the body.
“We’ll be looking into this incident and investigating what exactly occurred,” Wayne County Medical Examiner’s spokeswoman Mary Mazur said.
Also Sunday, a 46-year-old woman reported that she was kidnapped and raped by a man who forced her into a dark-blue van with tinted windows near Central and West Vernor at about 2:30 a.m. in southwest Detroit. According to a police report, the unknown man put a gun to the victim’s head and raped her near the spot where he picked her up, before dropping her off about three miles west near Dix and Oakwood.
ghunter@detroitnews.com
(313) 222-2134
From The Detroit News: http://www.detroitnews.com/article/2...#ixzz2d63Zfo7K
