The shooting occurred around 10:34 p.m., according to the investigative agency. The authorities did not provide information on the motives for the shooting in this town of about 3,000 inhabitants.
“What has our nation come to when children cannot attend a birthday party without fear?” President Joe Biden said in a statement Sunday.
Biden called the rise in gun violence in the United States “outrageous and unacceptable,” and urged Congress to pass laws that make gun manufacturers more accountable for gun violence, ban assault weapons and high-powered magazines. capacity, and require safe storage of firearms and background checks for gun sales.
bloody 16
This drama “is something that no city should know about,” Dadeville Police Chief Jonathan Floyd said.
The WRBL television network reported heavy police activity and crime scene blackout tapes around a building and white sheets covering parts of the floor on Sunday morning.
According to witnesses, several people were injured, most of them teenagers, and transported to local hospitals for treatment.
WRBL also reported that in a preliminary investigation, experts from the sheriff’s office estimated that an altercation led to the shooting at a teenager’s “Sweet 16” birthday party.
Phil Dowdell, the brother of the teenager who was celebrating his birthday, is among those killed, his grandmother, Annette Allen, told the local newspaper Montgomery Advertiser. The young man was in his last year of high school and should graduate in a few weeks.
“Everyone is grieving,” Allen said of the small community, noting that the Dowdells’ mother was also shot and wounded.
repeated violence
“Violent crimes have no place in our state,” Alabama Governor Kay Ivey reacted, expressing her “pain” on her Twitter account.
The United States, with around 330 million inhabitants, is full of weapons – an estimated 400 million of different types are distributed – and mass shootings with fatalities are commonplace.
On Saturday night authorities confirmed that two people were killed and four others wounded in a shooting in Louisville, Kentucky, the same city where a gunman killed five people in a bank last Monday.
In late March, a person opened fire at a private elementary school in Nashville, neighboring Tennessee, killing three 9-year-old boys and three staff before being shot dead by police.
This weekend’s shootings in Alabama and Kentucky come exactly 16 years after a massacre at Virginia Tech.
On April 16, 2007, a student shot and killed 32 people on this campus in Blacksburg, before committing suicide.
With information from AFP and Reuters.