MINNEAPOLIS (AP) — Eight people have been wounded, including four with critical injuries, in a shooting at a homeless camp on private property in Minneapolis, police said.
The shooting happened just hours after and blocks away from another shooting that left five injured near a transit station as city officials acknowledge a spate of recent violent crime in the area.
Those shootings come during a particularly violent summer for the Minneapolis area. That includes the assassination of Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband in their home, as well as the shooting of another state lawmaker and his wife the same day in June. A mass shooting at a Minneapolis church in late August killed two children and injured 21 others.
Police learned of the shooting at the homeless encampment around 10 p.m. Monday when an off-duty officer working at a nearby retail store was approached by people running from the camp and reporting gunfire, Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara said in a news conference following the city’s latest mass shooting. The officer left the store and heard gunfire coming from the encampment area.
Officers arriving at the scene found five people injured by gunfire, including a woman and two men with life-threatening injuries. Another man and a woman suffered what appeared to be non-life-threatening wounds, with each having injuries to their legs. All five were rushed to a hospital.
Police later learned that three other people, including one with life-threatening injuries, walked or were taken to hospitals before police arrived. O’Hara said no arrests had been made in either the encampment shooting or the earlier shooting near the transit station.
“Unfortunately, here we are yet again in the aftermath of a mass shooting,” O’Hara said. “This is not normal.”
The latest shooting happened at a homeless camp in a parking lot that has been at the center of a legal conflict between the owner of the property, Hamoudi Sabri, who opened it up to the homeless in July, and city officials who want it shut down. Sabri has refused to shut down the camp, and earlier this month, the city sued him to try to force the camp’s closure. Sabri is facing about $15,000 in citations and fines related to the encampment.
Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey said in a news conference in the hours after the shooting that the city will be “clearing this encampment immediately after the crime scene has been investigated.”
“This is way worse that just a nuisance. This is a danger to the community,” Frey said.
The city followed through Tuesday morning on Frey’s promise to clear the camp, drawing a crowd of dozens of camp residents and protesters, according to the Minnesota Star Tribune. City workers were seen loading bicycles, tents and other belongings in the back of garbage trucks while several people argued with police at the scene, saying they were told they could collect their few belongings before the encampment site was cleared.
Sabri responded with a statement criticizing city leaders for their response to the recent violence, saying the city should provide grief and trauma counselors and an emergency response that would offer hotels and emergency shelter beds for the homeless and those affected by the violence.
“Instead, the Mayor’s answer is the same tired move we’ve seen for years: displacement,” Sabri said. “Bulldoze people’s tents, fence off their space, and call it leadership. But it isn’t leadership. It’s an illusion of control designed to make the problem less visible, not less deadly.”
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