Washington, D.C., mayor Muriel Bowser demanded accountability after a 15-year-old boy was killed and three others, including a police officer, were shot during an unapproved Juneteenth celebration on Sunday.
One of the injured victims is a police officer who was shot in the leg, Metropolitan Police chief Robert J. Contee III said at a press conference early on Monday morning. The shooter is not in custody.
The shooting occurred near an outdoor music event called Moechella, held on U Street in northwest Washington, D.C., which was shut down by police earlier in the day because of two incidents including “some type of fight” between people at the concert, according to Contee. Moechella had billed the concert as a Juneteenth celebration on its Instagram page, although Contee said the event was “un-permitted.”
Footage from the event posted on Twitter by a local ABC News affiliate showed people running from the event:
DC MOECHELLA SHOOTING PANIC: A shooting sends a large crowd at the 'unpermitted' Moechella event into a panic in Northwest D.C.
A 15-year-old is dead and three others are injured, including an officer.
📸: Christian Mullins/@CMullins893
WHAT WE KNOW: https://t.co/5Pp6wjNrmO pic.twitter.com/A3dDW0GIWU
— 7News DC (@7NewsDC) June 20, 2022
Contee noted that police officers had confiscated several illegal handguns from the general area prior to the shooting. About 100 officers were on scene at the time of the shooting, Contee said.
Washington, D.C., mayor Muriel Bowser called for “accountability” in remarks at the same press conference.
“We have a child who was killed today at an event that did not have any proper planning for the number of people who were here and with guns involved, and with our police managing a crowd on site, somebody used a gun, and a child is dead.” Bowser said. “The chief and I will continue to make sure we have the resources we need on these corridors and all of our corridors but we need some accountability here.”
The Sunday shooting comes days after a separate shooting in the city’s Ward 7 that left two dead, including a 16-year-old.
There were 93 murders in Washington, D.C., since the start of this year, up 13 percent from the 82 murders recorded in the same period in 2021, according to Metropolitan Police statistics.
Bowser called on Metropolitan Police to hire more officers in 2021 amid a crime surge that year, and in April 2022 she told Axios‘s “What’s Next” conference that she “never supported defunding the police.”
The city council revised Bowser’s 2021 proposal by cutting $32 million from the police department budget and redirecting $9 million to a so-called violence interrupter program. The city council again cut $6 million from the police budget in its 2022 fiscal budget.