Shooting near high school in Colorado, six teens hospitalized

Six teenagers aged 14 to 18 were hospitalized after a shooting that occurred Monday near a high school in Aurora, Colorado (United States). Their days did not appear to be in danger, however, city police said. One of the victims had to undergo “emergency surgery” but “we were told their injuries were not fatal,” Aurora police chief Vanessa Wilson told a conference. hurry.

According to her, the six victims were all high school students attending an establishment near the park where the shooting took place. The perpetrators, who may have been linked to gangs, were still at large as of Monday afternoon.

Shots from one or more vehicles

Several cartridges of different calibers were found on site by investigators and some of the shots were fired from one or more moving vehicles. Asked by a journalist about this modus operandi which evokes the methods of gangs, Vanessa Wilson replied that “the investigation is only in its early stages”.

“We will study all the possibilities,” she added, calling on witnesses to the scene and residents to come forward to try to find the suspects. “I need everyone to be outraged by what happened today,” she said, calling gun violence a “public health crisis”.

A state affected by shootings

The state of Colorado, in the western United States, has seen some of the worst killings in American history. In 1999, two teenagers killed 12 classmates and a teacher at their Columbine high school. And in 2012, a heavily armed man shot dead 12 people in a cinema in Aurora, during the screening of a film about Batman, The Dark Knight Rises. Last March, an armed man killed ten people in a supermarket in Boulder, 50 km from Denver, capital of Colorado.

The shootings resulting in many victims remain a recurring scourge in American schools, supermarkets or in the workplace in particular. But blockages in Congress, under the influence of the arms lobby, make any major breakthrough on the subject unlikely despite calls from politicians, President Joe Biden included, to tighten control over their circulation.