8-year-old killed, 3 injured in shooting at Alabama mall
HOOVER,
Ala. (AP) — An 8-year-old boy was killed Friday in a shooting at an
Alabama’s shopping mall that left three other people injured, police
said.
Hoover Police Chief Nick Derzis said the child was killed
in the afternoon shooting at the Riverchase Galleria. The police chief
said a girl and two adults were also hospitalized after the shooting.
Authorities did not release the victims’ names.
Police did not
give a motive for the shooting. Derzis said police are working promising
leads, but did not say if they had identified suspects.
“This is
certainly a tragic situation when you have an innocent child who gets
caught in the middle of an altercation between others,” Derzis said.
Multiple
shots were reported near the food court inside the mall, police said.
“We don’t know at this point what led to the shooting or how many gunmen
were involved,” Police Capt. Gregg Rector said in an earlier news
release.
Hoover Mayor Frank Brocato said he visited with the boy’s parents Friday evening.
“This
was just a very senseless tragedy and of course they are devastated by
this,” Brocato said. He asked residents in the city to pray for the
family.
The mall was evacuated after the shooting
Annalisa Pope, who works at Hollister in the mall, told WBMA-TV in a telephone interview that she heard six to seven shots fired.
“It wasn’t just one or two,” she said. “That’s what got me off guard. They (the shots) just kept going.”
She said the gunshots “sounded like they were coming from every direction.”
Hoover police asked anyone was in the mall who witnessed the shooting to call authorities.
“It
felt so close,” she said. “It was so surreal. It doesn’t even feel real
right now. You wouldn’t expect something like that to happen out of
nowhere on a normal, Friday afternoon.”
The mall in suburban
Birmingham was the site of a 2018 police shooting where an officer
fatally shot a Black man with a gun after mistaking him for the gunman
in an earlier shooting at the mall.
The shooting of 21-year-old Emantic “EJ” Bradford Jr. prompted a series of protests at the mall. The Alabama attorney general’s office cleared the officer, saying he acted “reasonably under the circumstances” in the encounter that spanned approximately five seconds.